These men ask for just the same thing—fairness, and fairness only—Abraham Lincoln
Abstract
Although managing fairness is a critical concern for organizations, not all managers are predisposed to enact high levels of fairness. Emerging empirical evidence suggests that personality characteristics can be an important antecedent of managers’ fair behavior. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to understand how to promote fairness among managers who are naturally predisposed to engage in lower levels of fairness. Building upon self-awareness theory, we argue that increasing managers’ self-awareness can motivate managers with low trait empathy to engage in greater levels of justice. We test the interactive effects of trait empathy and state self-awareness using an experimental study (N = 76) in which individuals were asked to communicate negative news. In support of our hypothesis, our results indicate that increasing self-awareness through self-focusing situations can help promote interactional justice when communicating negative news for individuals with low trait empathy. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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Notes
Although interactional justice is sometimes further separated into interpersonal and informational justice (e.g., Colquitt 2001), we examine interactional justice for a number of reasons. From a theoretical perspective, interpersonal and informational justice are closely related, and both dimensions have the same hypothesized effects in this context. Thus, interactional justice provides a more parsimonious explanation. From an empirical perspective, our results also indicated that interpersonal and informational justice were highly correlated (r = 0.73). Finally, interactional justice has been used extensively in recent research, and our approach is consistent with these studies (e.g., Ambrose and Schminke 2009b; Barclay and Kiefer, in press; Barsky and Kaplan 2007; Spencer and Rupp 2009).
We thank an anonymous reviewer for this point.
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Whiteside, D.B., Barclay, L.J. The Face of Fairness: Self-Awareness as a Means to Promote Fairness among Managers with Low Empathy. J Bus Ethics 137, 721–730 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2357-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2357-7