The old adage is that we don’t leave our jobs but rather our bosses, and one of the more obvious complaints we can have against our manager is that they treat us unfairly.  It’s tempting to believe that this unfair treatment is due to personality differences, a lack of training on their behalf, or simply a lack of basic aptitude for leadership.

New research from the University of North Carolina suggests an alternative hypothesis, however, and argues that their unfair treatment might simply be down to an excessive workload and skewed rewards from the company that does not incentivize fair treatment of staff.

“We need to think about why the workplace environment can create these types of behaviors. Instead of thinking, ‘This is a bad manager because his or her employees are unhappy,’ I would start thinking, ‘What are we asking him or her to do? How is the organization leading him or her to behave in those ways?’ This is a different way to look at issues related to effective management and supervision,” the researchers explain.

Fair treatment

The paper highlights that few companies explicitly state that managers should strive to treat staff fairly, nor reward them for doing so.  This is despite the rewards for doing so in terms of employee engagement, turnover, and productivity being fairly evident.

The authors suggest that fairness, from the employee’s perspective, consists of four key components:

• Distributive fairness—“Did I get the outcome I think I deserved? Was it appropriate given my contribution?”

• Procedural fairness—“How was the decision made? Did I get an opportunity to give my opinion? Is this decision consistent with what has been done before, and with other people?”

• Informational fairness—“Did I get all the information that I needed in a timely manner?”

• Interpersonal fairness—“Were interactions polite and respectful, or were they curt and rude?”

Despite the evident benefits of being fair with employees, the paper highlights the considerable time investment required by managers to actually be so.  As such, when managers have a heavy workload, this can often fall by the wayside.

“When managers face high workloads (as they often do), something’s got to give, and fair treatment becomes the unfortunate casualty,” the researchers explain.  “Employees often complain that managers are too busy to meet with them, listen to their concerns, or update them about decisions; similarly, managers often acknowledge that they behave insensitively towards employees or act less fairly because they are overloaded or lack time.”

Focusing on the wrong things

The authors argue that many organizations incentivize managers to focus on technical tasks rather than the kind of relational tasks that underpin fair treatment of staff.  It’s a problem that can be overcome in a number of ways.

For instance, managers can be given greater autonomy over their schedule so that they can spend more time with their team.  They can also explicitly make fairness something that managers are assessed on in formal performance evaluation and reward systems.

“When Google started directly evaluating managers based on behaviors, such as explaining decisions and expressing interest in employees’ well-being, which align with informational and interpersonal [fairness] rules, busy managers who previously felt that such behaviors were frivolous started devoting more time and effort to them at the expense of other technical tasks,” the researchers say.