Organizational Justice

Organizational justice refers to individual or collective judgments of fairness or ethical propriety. Investigations of organizational justice tend to take a descriptive approach. As such, an event is treated as fair or unfair to the extent that one believes it to be so. This belief in fairness comes from the comparison of a particular occurrence with a set of evaluative criteria, or justice rules. If the occurrence violates the rule, it is viewed as unfair. Justice research is concerned with identifying the antecedents that influence fairness judgments, as well as the organizational consequences once such an evaluation has been made. Notice that this descriptive approach does not tell organizations what really is fair, only what people believe to be just. This empirical perspective complements the ...