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Social Identification Predicts Desires and Expectations for Voice

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Abstract

Although a large body of empirical and theoretical work in procedural justice points to the positive consequences of providing voice to people, it remains unclear whether, and to what degree, people may desire voice in the first instance. The current paper presents two studies in which we directly measure people’s relative levels of voice desires and expectations. We hypothesized that any variability in these outcomes would be predicted, at least in part, by people’s relative levels of social identification with salient voice-relevant in-groups. We confirmed this hypothesis in one correlational study with pre-existing groups (Australia and participants’ workplaces) and one study with experimentally created, minimal groups. Results revealed that people do desire and expect voice, but these are neither necessarily extreme nor uniform. Moreover, consistent with our hypothesis, variability in these desires and expectations was associated in a systematic manner with the relative levels of social identification related to a salient in-group that is relevant to the voice context. We consider the implications of these findings with regard to theories of procedural justice, as well as critical directions for future empirical and theoretical work.

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Notes

  1. Prior to the answering the questions below, participants first responded to a series of questions measuring power distance ideology (Brockner et al., 2001; Clugston, Howell, & Dorfman, 2000) and right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1996; Duckitt, Bizumic, Krauss, & Heled, 2010). Neither of these ideologies entered into any main or interaction effects on voice desires and expectations. As the results we present below were not qualified in any manner by these, we do not report these ideologies any further.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP120103083.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research School of Psychology, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, 2601, Australia

    Michael J. Platow, Li Lim & Hayley Tapper

  2. The University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yuen J. Huo

  3. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Tom R. Tyler

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  1. Michael J. Platow
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  2. Yuen J. Huo
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Correspondence to Michael J. Platow.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethical permission to conduct this research was provided by the ANU Human Research Ethics Committee.

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Platow, M.J., Huo, Y.J., Lim, L. et al. Social Identification Predicts Desires and Expectations for Voice. Soc Just Res 28, 526–549 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-015-0254-6

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