David Patient

Increasing Interpersonal and Informational Justice When Communicating Negative News: The Role of the Manager's Empathic Concern and Moral Development

The authors report two studies exploring the role of a manager’s empathy in delivering negative news more fairly. In Study 1, 132 practicing managers completed a scenario task in which a layoff was to be communicated. Trait empathic concern predicted interpersonal and informational justice of written messages. In Study 2, 81 students provided face-to-face feedback to a confederate, which was videotaped. An empathic induction resulted in higher levels of interpersonal and informational justice relative to a control group. Furthermore, the empathic induction had a greater effect on interpersonal and informational justice for communicators who were high (versus low) in moral development.

Understanding Workplace Envy Through Narrative Fiction

In this article, we explore the social construction of workplace envy through an analysis of its portrayal in a fictional narrative. Based on our examination of three excerpts from Richard Russos novel Straight Man, we argue that envy is socially constructed in prominent and revealing episodes within broader organizational narratives. We further show that envy both serves as a catalytic emotion that engenders action and sensemaking, and at the same time, acts as a mechanism that reproduces the moral and cultural order within which it occurs.

Bringing Together Different Perspectives on Ethical Leadership

Recent corporate scandals, including the mortgage situation precipitating the global financial crisis in 2008, have led many people to question the role of un/ ethical leadership in corporate misbehaviour. Organizational scholars contribute to our understanding of ethical leadership by investigating and theorizing within the organizational justice, trust, business ethics and leadership literatures. Unfortunately, work relating to ethical leadership from these different subfields has rarely been brought together, despite common themes and concerns. As a result, the accumulated insights have been described as ‘underdeveloped and fragmented’ (Brown and Treviño, 2006), leading some researchers to call for better integration of these literatures (van Knippenberg et al., 2007; De Cremer, Mayer and Schminke, 2010; Rupp et al., 2010). This Special Issue is an attempt to take a step in that direction by bringing together five articles that propose links between leadership, ethics, integrity, organizational justice and trust. Existing theoretical definitions are explored and new theory is proposed, based on exploratory qualitative and quantitative studies, from North American and several European jurisdictions. Because of the central role that leadership, ethics, justice and trust can play in how we experience and manage workplace change, the topic is well suited for the readership of Journal of Change Management Vol. 12, No. 4, 377–381, December 2012

Systemic justice and burnout: A multilevel model

With the aim of extending organisational justice research to embrace significant and enduring aspects of the workplace context, this study examines organisational culture and human resource management (HRM) as constitutive dimensions of systemic justice and relates them to employee health. Bridging organisational justice, HRM, organisational culture, and occupational health research, we advance and test a multilevel model relating systemic justice to burnout. Data collected from 60 organisations; 89 employee groups; and 1,976 employees provide support for the hypothesised relationships between justice-oriented culture, in terms of organisational values and group culture, and justice-oriented HRM. In turn, justice-oriented HRM related directly to employee burnout and indirectly through employee perceived job control and supervisor social support.

Tell Me Who, and I’ll Tell You How Fair: A Model of Agent Bias in Justice Reasoning

A salient and underresearched aspect of un/fair treatment in organizations can be the source of justice, in terms of a specific justice agent. We propose a model of agent bias to describe how and when characteristics of the agent enacting justice are important to justice reasoning. The agent bias is defined as the effect on overall event justice perceptions of specific agent characteristics, over and above the effect via distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. For justice recipients to focus on agent characteristics rather than on the event being evaluated in terms of fairness is an unexplored bias in justice judgments. Agent warmth, competence, and past justice track record (entity justice) are identified as agent characteristics that influence justice judgments. Agent characteristics can influence overall event justice perceptions positively or negatively, depending on the ambiguity in terms of justice of the event and on its expectedness from a particular justice agent. Finally, we propose that agent bias is stronger when justice recipients use intuitive versus analytic information processing of event information. Our model of agent bias has important theoretical implications for theories of organizational justice and for other literatures, as well as important practical implications for organizations and managers.