Fairness is something that most of us cherish in the workplace, but as new research from the University of Notre Dame illustrates, it’s not always as straightforward to achieve as we might think. It reveals that how we feel about the behavior of a supervisor is dependent on a number of factors.
These factors, the researchers explain, revolve around something known as the justice criteria of rules. These include the use of decision-making processes that give employees voice, that are consistently deployed among employees, that treat employees with dignity and respect, and provide them with honest explanations.
“We found that prosocially motivated supervisors—or those who focus on their employees’ needs—are more likely to adhere to justice rules than those motivated by self-interest,” the researchers say. “This implies that employees may only care about motives insofar as they impact justice. However, employees also care about and rely on their impressions of their supervisors’ motives as they think about their fairness. Compared with supervisors who are considered to be self-interested, those perceived to be prosocially motivated are regarded as fairer, even after accounting for how much they adhere to traditional justice best practices. And when justice is low, employees will give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Showing lenience
This means that if a manager who is ordinarily fair and prosocial has an off day and acts out of character, their team is far more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt and not judge them for what they perceive to be the uncharacteristic display of unfairness.
“We talk about objective justice standards as if they are an easy thing for supervisors to live up to at all times in all situations,” the researchers explain. “But supervisors are fallible human beings who, inadvertently or not, are likely to end up falling short. They might make decisions without granting employees voice, they might gloss over or fail to explain their decisions, or they might engage in curt interactions. Our work shows that prosocial motives can help buffer the typical downsides associated with these missteps. In one of our studies, the prosocial effect is so strong that it seems to substitute for high justice.”
The findings emerged from six distinct studies designed to understand how we respond to fair, and unfair, practices. The studies reveal that employees tend to lean heavily on the motives of their supervisors when determining how fairly they have been treated. As such, as long as the supervisor behaves in a fair way, they are less harshly judged should they veer from this norm at any time.
Self-interest
Logically, one might expect that the opposite would be the case for managers who act less in the interest of their team and more in their own self-interest, but that wasn’t what emerged.
“We assumed self-interest coupled with low justice behavior would elicit a stronger response from employees, but it did not,” the researchers say. “People do respond negatively, but we assumed there would be more outrage, that there might be a sense among employees that things would never get better, but we find that the response is no different than what you would expect from either self-interest or low justice separately.”
When we strive to ensure people feel fairly treated, managers can often focus on rules and policies with objective standards underpinning them so that people can feel confident in fairness being abided to. While these things are important, it’s also important to remember the motives that drive our behaviors. If we really want to create fair workplaces, then those motivations cannot be overlooked.
