Madan M. Pillutla

Power-Distance, Gender and Organizational Justice

A sample of Hong Kong employees was used to test the hypotheses that power-distance orientation and gender moderate the relationships between justice perceptions and the evaluation of authorities (trust in supervisor) and the organization (contract fulfillment). Results indicated that 1) the relationship between procedural justice and contract fulfillment was higher for males, 2) the relationship between procedural justice and trust in supervisor was higher for those with low power-distance orientations, and 3) the relationship between distributive justice and contract fulfillment was higher for those with low power-distance orientations. The discussion addresses the implication of including power-distance and gender variables in research on procedural and distributive justice.

Attributions of trust and the calculus of reciprocity

Abstract This research investigated trust and reciprocity in two experiments using the Trust Game. In the Trust Game, Player 1 can “trust” an unknown Player 2 by sending some portion of a monetary endowment. The amount sent triples on its way to Player 2, who can then “reciprocate” by returning as much as he or she wishes to Player 1. Initial endowments were either

Fairness in Bargaining

10 or

Player Types and Self-Impression Management in Dictatorship Games: Two Experiments

20 and were known to recipients; amounts sent were experimentally manipulated and varied from

How Important Is an Apology to You?: Forecasting Errors in Evaluating the Value of Apologies

2 to the entire endowment. Although many trusted parties returned enough money to equalize outcomes, trustors only benefited, on average, when they sent all or almost all of their endowments. Results suggested that recipients viewed sending less than everything as a lack of trust and that felt obligations mediated choices to reciprocate. These and other results contrast markedly with traditional, incremental models of the trust process, which suggest that initial trustors should take small risks and build trust gradually.

Understanding Ethical Behavior and Decision Making in Management: A Behavioural Business Ethics Approach

This paper uses historical and contemporary philosophical discussions of fairness to present a structural approach to the definition of fairness. After establishing a set of standards (not a specific definition), we assess the impact of fairness in negotiations and bargaining. Our analysis concludes that truly fair behavior is absent in bargaining and negotiations. Instead, behaviors that have been called just can also be characterized as self-interested. Our review suggests that the term fairness has been used rather loosely, as a convenient label or as a more palatable alternative to self-interested explanations for an individuals choices. For reasons of both parsimony and accuracy, we recommend that the self-interest of the actors be carefully considered before calling their bargaining behavior fair.

Modelling Bounded Rationality in Organizations: Progress and Prospects

Abstract Recent experimental research on dictatorship games shows that many dictators share their outcomes with unknown, anonymous others. The data suggests that dictators can be “typed” as rational (taking the maximum), equal (splitting outcomes equally), or “other.” This paper experimentally tests the self-impression management model, which predicts that individuals act to show themselves in a positive light, even when they are the only observer of their own behavior. The model predicts that the “other” type of dictator will avoid being greedy by taking more only as their choices are increasingly restricted. Results from two experiments support the models predictions. The conclusion advocates differentiating basic psychological motivations in modeling individual behavior. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, C91, D63.

Organizational sciences’ obsession with ‘‘that’s interesting!’’: Consequences and an alternative

Apologies are commonly used to deal with transgressions in relationships. Results to date, however, indicate that the positive effects of apologies vary widely, and the match between people’s judgments of apologies and the true value of apologies has not been studied. Building on the affective and behavioral forecasting literature, we predicted that people would overestimate how much they value apologies in reality. Across three experimental studies, our results showed that after having been betrayed by another party (or after imagining this to be the case), people (a) rated the value of an apology much more highly when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology and (b) displayed greater trusting behavior when they imagined receiving an apology than when they actually received an apology. These results suggest that people are prone to forecasting errors regarding the effectiveness of an apology and that they tend to overvalue the impact of receiving one.

Towards a model of international research teams

Management and businesses in general are constantly facing important ethical challenges. In the current special issue, we identify the widespread emergence of unethical decision-making and behaviour in management as an important topic for a future research agenda. Specifically, we promote the use of a behavioural business ethics approach to better understand when management, leaders and businesses are inclined to act unethically and why this is the case. A behavioural business ethics approach which relies on important insights from psychology should be a necessary addition and complementary to the traditional normative approaches used in business ethics.

Groups as Enablers of Unethical Behavior: The Role of Cohesion on Group Member Actions

AbstractMuch of the formal modelling work in the organizational sciences relies on Herbert Simons conception of bounded rationality, and it stakes a claim to drawing on behaviorally plausible assu...