Lieven Brebels

Retaliation as a Response to Procedural Unfairness: A Self-Regulatory Approach

When does procedural unfairness result in retaliation, and why do recipients of unfair treatment sometimes pursue and other times inhibit retaliation? Five studies addressed these questions. The authors proposed and found that regulatory focus moderates retaliation against an unfairness-enacting authority: Promotion-focus participants were more likely to retaliate than prevention-focus participants. Promotion focus was associated with, and also heightened the accessibility of, the individual self. In turn, individual-self accessibility influenced retaliation. In fact, prevention-focus participants were as retaliatory as promotion-focus participants under conditions of high individual-self accessibility. Implications for the procedural fairness and regulatory focus literatures are discussed, and suggestions for future research are offered.

Using Self-Definition to Predict the Influence of Procedural Justice on Organizational-, Interpersonal-, and Job/Task-Oriented Citizenship Behavior:

An integrative self-definition model is proposed to improve our understanding of how procedural justice affects different outcome modalities in organizational behavior. Specifically, it is examined whether the strength of different levels of self-definition (collective, relational, and individual) each uniquely interact with procedural justice to predict organizational, interpersonal, and job/task-oriented citizenship behaviors, respectively. Results from experimental and (both single and multisource) field data consistently revealed stronger procedural justice effects (1) on organizational-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves strongly in terms of organizational characteristics, (2) on interpersonal-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves strongly in terms of their interpersonal relationships, and (3) on job/task-oriented citizenship behavior among those who define themselves weakly in terms of their distinctiveness or uniqueness. We discuss the relevance of these results with respect to how employees can be motivated most effectively in organizational settings.

Willing and Able: Action-State Orientation and the Relation Between Procedural Justice and Employee Cooperation

Existing justice theory explains why fair procedures motivate employees to adopt cooperative goals, but it fails to explain how employees strive toward these goals. We study self-regulatory abilities that underlie goal striving, abilities that should thus affect employees’ display of cooperative behavior in response to procedural justice. Building on action control theory, we argue that employees who display effective self-regulatory strategies (action-oriented employees) display relatively strong cooperative behavioral responses to fair procedures. A multisource field study and a laboratory experiment support this prediction. A subsequent experiment addresses the process underlying this effect by explicitly showing that action orientation facilitates attainment of the cooperative goals that people adopt in response to fair procedures, thus facilitating the display of actual cooperative behavior. This goal striving approach better integrates research on the relationship between procedural justice and employee cooperation in the self-regulation and the work motivation literature. It also offers organizations a new perspective on making procedural justice effective in stimulating employee cooperation by suggesting factors that help employees reach their adopted goals.