“We hope that our paper reflects the lessons taught by the primary studies it reviews: that fairness is an important and multifaceted concern inside organizations.”

In most cases, the visibility of an article is a function of its quality and its timing. I believe our research team (including Donald Conlon, Michael Wesson, Christopher Porter, and Kok Yee Ng) crafted a meta-analytic review of the organizational justice literature that was both comprehensive and well-organized. It provided a quantitative summary of the antecedents of fair treatment (e.g., voice, neutrality, interpersonal sensitivity) along with the attitudinal and behavioral consequences of such treatment (e.g., job satisfaction, citizenship behaviors). However, it is also important to note that our review was the first meta-analysis published in the justice literature—a literature that has grown at an incredible rate over the past four years. That timing is a very important piece of the impact of our article.

The article summarizes 25 years of research on organizational justice, a literature devoted to understanding fairness in organizational and other task-relevant contexts. As the first meta-analysis in that literature, it provided a helpful summary of the decades-old discovery that fairness perceptions are driven by many different facets of decision-making experiences, and have implications for many aspects of employee reactions.

Our research grew out of an awareness that the organizational justice literature had reached a stage of development where it was a fairly large and established domain of organizational inquiry, but one that had never been summarized in a quantitative way. We felt that we could write a meta-analytic review that would highlight what we do (and do not) know about fairness in organizations while providing guidelines for future research in the area.

We hope that our paper reflects the lessons taught by the primary studies it reviews: that fairness is an important and multifaceted concern inside organizations. If you ask managers whether they treat their employees fairly, many are tempted to reply by quoting the percentile of their average pay level. In many cases, employees react more strongly to procedural facets of fairness (e.g., whether procedures provide voice and input and are neutral and correctable) or interpersonal facets of fairness (e.g., whether managers are polite and respectful and explain decisions thoroughly). We believe that managers would benefit from gaining a greater understanding of all the facets of fairness in an effort to better motivate and retain their employees.