Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

Righting the Wrong for Third Parties: How Monetary Compensation, Procedure Changes and Apologies Can Restore Justice for Observers of Injustice

  • Published:
Journal of Business Ethics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

People react negatively not only to injustices they personally endure but also to injustices that they observe as bystanders at work—and typically, people observe more injustices than they personally experience. It is therefore important to understand how organizations can restore observers’ perceptions of justice after an injustice has occurred. In our paper, we employ a policy capturing design to test and compare the restorative power of monetary compensation, procedure changes and apologies, alone and in combination, from the perspective of third parties. We extend previous research on remedies by including different degrees of compensation and procedural changes, by comparing the effects of sincere versus insincere apologies and by including apologies from additional sources. The results indicate that monetary compensation, procedure changes, and sincere apologies all have a significant and positive effect on how observers perceive the restoration of justice. Insincere apologies, on the other hand, have no significant effect on restoration for third parties. Procedural changes were found to have the strongest remedial effects, a remedy rarely included in previous research. One interpretation of this finding could be that observers of injustice prefer solutions that are not short sighted: changing procedures avoids future injustices that could affect other people. We found that combinations of remedies, such that the presence of a second remedy strengthens the effect of the first remedy, are particularly effective. Our findings regarding interactions underline the importance of studying and administering remedies in conjunction with each other.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Nationalities present in our study were: Spanish, French, North American, Brazilian, Chinese, Bulgarian, Egyptian, Greek, German, Italian, Chilean, Nigerian, Malaysian, British, Ugandan, Indian, Filipino, Armenian, Thai, Ghanaian and Jordanian.

  2. Previous studies have typically linked specific remedies to specific injustice types. For example, monetary compensation to procedural injustices (Reb et al. 2006), and apologies to interactional injustice (Wenzel and Okimoto 2010). Yet typical injustice incidents in the workplace involve several injustice dimensions at the same time. Often, a negative outcome is linked to a flaw in the procedure (Folger 2001a), and interactional injustices occur often when communicating negative outcomes (Folger and Skarlicki 2001). Furthermore, negative behavior is typically triggered after several injustices occur, not a single one (Cropanzano et al. 2001). This view is supported by recent studies on the mediating role of overall justice perceptions—it seems to be people’s overall sense of fairness rather than their experience with any particular dimension of fairness that drives their behavior (Ambrose and Schminke 2009; Holtz and Harold 2009). We have therefore used more holistic injustice experience as the basis of our study, in order to better capture a typical situation that people may hear about in their organization.

  3. We have chosen a direct manipulation for apologies because, from a third party perspective, what is reported by others is usually a summary and interpretation of what happened, rather than a description of all of the cues that might make one suspect the apology was sincere or insincere.

  4. In an exploratory analysis of participants’ suggestions regarding remedies for the case presented here, only two (out of 60) participants suggested punishment as a remedy. In the situation in which top management is the source, no one suggested punishment, indicating that punishment appears unrealistic in this situation. Therefore, we decided to focus on other remedies (apologies, procedure changes, compensation) instead.

References

  • Adams, J. S. (1963). Toward an understanding of inequity. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67, 422–436.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 267–299). New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aiman-Smith, L., Scullen, S. E., & Barr, S. H. (2002). Conducting studies of decision making in organizational contexts: A tutorial for policy-capturing and other regression-based techniques. Organizational Research Methods, 5(4), 388–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ambrose, M., & Schminke, M. (2009). The role of overall justice judgments in organizational justice research: A test of mediation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(2), 491–500.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baron, R. A. (1988). Attributions and organizational conflict: The mediating role of apparent sincerity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 41, 111–127.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Batson, C. D., Sager, K., Garst, E., Kang, M., Rubchinsky, K., & Dawson, K. (1997). Is empathy-induced helping due to self-other merging? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 43, 742–753.

    Google Scholar 

  • Blader, S., & Tyler, R. (2003). What constitutes fairness in work settings? A four-component model of procedural justice. Human Resource Management Review, 13, 107–126.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Blader, S. L., Wiesenfeld, B. M., Fortin, M., & Wheeler-Smith, S. L. (2013). Fairness lies in the heart of the beholder: How the social emotions of third parties influence reactions to injustice. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 121(1), 62–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bottom, W. P., Gibson, K., Daniels, S. E., & Murnighan, J. K. (2002). When talk is not cheap: Substantive penance and expressions of intent in rebuilding cooperation. Organization Science, 13(5), 497–513.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brockner, J., & Wiesenfeld, B. M. (1996). An integrative framework for explaining reactions to decision: Interactive effects of outcomes and procedures. Psychological Bulletin, 120, 189–208.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, A. C., & Trivedi, P. K. (2010). Microeconometrics using. College Station, TX: Stata Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cobb, A. T., Folger, R., & Wooten, K. (1995). The role justice plays in organizational change. Public Administration Quarterly, 19(2), 135–151.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cohen-Charash, Y., & Spector, P. E. (2001). The role of justice in organizations: A meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86(2), 278–321.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cojuharenco, I., Patient, D., & Bashshur, M. (2011). Seeing the “forest” or the “trees” of organizational justice: Effects of temporal perspective on employee concerns about unfair treatment at work. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 116, 17–31.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conlon, D. E., Meyer, C. J., & Nowakowski, J. M. (2005). How does organizational justice affect performance, withdrawal and counterproductive behavior? In J. Greenberg & J. A. Colquitt (Eds.), Handbook of organizational justice. Nahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooksey, R. W. (1996). Judgment analysis: Theory, methods and applications. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cropanzano, R., Byrne, Z. S., Bobocel, R., & Rupp, D. (2001). Moral virtues, fairness heuristics, social entities and other denizens of organizational justice. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 58(2), 164–209.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cropanzano, R., Goldman, B. M., & Folger, R. (2003). Deontic Justice: The role of moral principles in workplace fairness. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 26, 985–991.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Cremer, D. (2010). To pay or to apologize? On the psychology of dealing with unfair offers in a dictator game. Journal of Economic Psychology, 31(6), 843–848.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dirks, K. T., Kim, P. H., Ferrin, D. L., & Cooper, C. D. (2011). Understanding the effects of substantive responses on trust following. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 90(2), 87–103.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Eaton, J., Santelli, A. G., & Struthers, W. C. (2009). Fit to forgive: Exploring the interaction between regulatory focus, repentance, and forgiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(2), 381–394.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25, 63–87.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415, 137–140.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R. (1998). Fairness as a moral virtue. In M. Schminke (Ed.), Managerial ethics: Moral management of people and processes. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R. (2001a). The commonality between distributive, procedural and interactional justice. In D. D. S. Stephen Gilliland & Daniel. Skarlicki (Eds.), Theoretical and cultural perspectives on organizational justice. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R. (2001b). Fairness as deonance. In S. Gilliland, D. Steiner, & D. Skarlicki (Eds.), Theoretical and cultural perspectives on organizational justice (pp. 3–34). Greenwich, CT: IAP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R., & Cropanzano, R. (2001). Fairness theory: Justice as accountability. In J. Greenberg & R. Cropanzano (Eds.), Advances in organizational justice (pp. 1–55). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R., Cropanzano, R., & Goldman, B. M. (2005). What is the relationship between justice and morality? In J. Greenberg & J. A. Colquitt (Eds.), Handbook of organizational justice (pp. 215–245). Nahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

    Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R., & Salvador, R. (2008). Is management theory too “Self-ish”. Journal of Management, 34(6), 1127–1151.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Folger, R., & Skarlicki, D. P. (2001). Fairness as dependent variable: Why though times can lead to bad management. In R. Cropanzano (Ed.), Justice in the workplace. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Graham, M. E., & Cable, D. M. (2001). Consideration of the incomplete block design for policy-capturing research. Organizational Research Methods, 4(1), 26–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenberg, J. (1990). Looking fair vs. being fair: Managing impressions of organizational justice. Research in Organizational Behavior, 12, 111–157.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greene, W. H. (2012). Econometric analysis. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holtz, B. C., & Harold, C. M. (2009). Fair today, fair tomorrow? A longitudinal investigation of overall justice perceptions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(5), 1185–1199.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Judge, T. A., & Bretz, R. D. J. (1992). Effects of work values on job choice decisions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(3), 261–271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewicki, R. J., & Bunker, B. B. (1996). Developing and maintaining trust in work relationships. In R. M. Kramer & T. R. Tyler (Eds.), Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research (pp. 114–139). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lind, E. A., Kray, L. J., & Thompson, L. (1998). The social construction of injustices: Fairness judgments in response to own and others’ unfair treatment by authorities. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 75(1), 1–22.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nadisic, T. (2008). The Robin Hood effect. Antecendents and consequences of managers using invisible remedies to correct workplace injustice. In S. W. Gilliland, D. D. Steiner, & D. P. Skarlicki (Eds.), Justice, morality and social responsibility (pp. 125–153). Greenwich: IAP.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nelissen, R. M. A., & Zeelenberg, M. (2009). Moral emotions as determinants of third-party punishment: Anger, guilt, and the functions of altruistic sanctions. Judgment and Decision Making, 4(7), 543–553.

    Google Scholar 

  • Okimoto, T. G. (2008). Outcomes as affirmation of membership value: Monetary compensation as an administrative response to procedural injustice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(5), 1270–1282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Okimoto, T. G., & Tyler, A. T. R. (2007). Is compensation enough? Relational concerns in responding to unintended inequity. Group Processes & Intergroup Relationships, 10(3), 399–420.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Okimoto, T. G., & Wenzel, M. (2009). Punishment as restoration of group and offender values following a transgression: Value consensus through symbolic labelling and offender reform. European Journal of Social Psychology, 39(3), 346–367.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • O’Malley, M. N., & Greenberg, J. (1983). Sex differences in restoring justice: The down payment effect. Journal of Reserach in personality, 17(2), 174–185.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Patient, D., & Skarlicki, D. P. (2010). Increasing interpersonal and informational justice when communicating negative news: The role of the manager’s empathic concern and moral development. Journal of Management, 36(2), 555–578.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reb, J., Goldman, B. M., Kray, L. J., & Cropanzano, R. (2006). Different wrongs, different remedies? Reactions to organizational remedies after procedural and interactional injustice. Personnel Psychology, 59(1), 31–64.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rossi, P. H., & Anderson, A. B. (1982). The factorial survey approach: An introduction. In P. H. Rossi & S. L. Nock (Eds.), Measuring social judgments: A factorial survey approach. Berverly Hills, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Russell, C. J., & Sell, M. V. (2012). A closer look at decisions to quit. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117(1), 125–137.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schminke, M., & Ambrose, M. L. (1997). The effect of ethical frameworks on perceptions of organizational justice. Academy of Management Journal, 40(5), 1190–1207.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shapiro, D. L. (1991). The effects of explanations on negative reactions to deceit. Administative Science Quarterly, 36, 614–630.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skarlicki, D. P., Ellard, J. H., & Kelln, B. R. C. (1998). Third party perceptions of lay-off: Procedural, derogation, and retributive aspects of justice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 119–127.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skarlicki, D. P., Folger, R., & Gee, J. (2004). When social accounts backfire: The exacerbating effects of a polite message or an apology on reactions to an unfair outcome. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34(2), 322–341.

    Google Scholar 

  • Skarlicki, D. P., & Kulik, C. (2005). Third parties’ reaction to employee mistreatment: A justice perspective. Research in Organizational Behavior, 26, 183–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tedeschi, J., & Reiss, M. (1981). Verbal strategies in impression management. In C. Antaki (Ed.), The psychology of ordinary explanations of social behavior. London: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thibaut, J., & Walker, L. (1975). Procedural justice: A psychological analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomlinson, E. C., Dineen, B. R., & Lewicki, R. J. (2004). The road to reconciliation: Antecedents of victim willingness to reconcile following a broken promise. Journal of Management, 30(2), 165–187.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tomlinson, E. C., & Mayer, R. C. (2009). The role of causal attribution dimensions in trust repair. The Academy of Management Review, 34(1), 85–104.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tucker, S., Turner, N., Barling, J., Reid, E., & Elving, C. (2006). Apologies and transformational leadership. Journal of Business Ethics, 63(2), 195–207.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Turillo, C. J., Folger, R., Lavelle, J. J., Umphress, E., & Gee, J. (2002). Is virtue its own reward? Self-sacrificial decisions for the sake of fairness. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 89, 839–865.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wenzel, M., & Okimoto, T. G. (2010). How acts of forgiveness restore a sense of justice: Addressing status/power and value concerns raised by transgressions. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(3), 401–417.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wenzel, M., Okimoto, T. G., Feather, N. T., & Platow, M. J. (2008). Retributive and restorative justice. Law and Human Behavior, 32(5), 375–389.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank professors Domènec Melé, Josep Maria Rosanas and David Patient for their helpful comments on previous versions of the manuscript. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful reviews and all the help provided throughout the process. We also would like to add that Miguel-Angel Canela received the support of the project ECO2009-08302-E, promoted by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IESE Business School, Universidad de Navarra, Avda Pearson, 21, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Natàlia Cugueró-Escofet & Miguel-Angel Canela

  2. Centre for Research in Management, Université de Toulouse 1, Toulouse, France

    Marion Fortin

  3. ISS International Business School of Service Management, Hamburg, Germany

    Marion Fortin

Authors
  1. Natàlia Cugueró-Escofet
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Marion Fortin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Miguel-Angel Canela
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Natàlia Cugueró-Escofet.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Cugueró-Escofet, N., Fortin, M. & Canela, MA. Righting the Wrong for Third Parties: How Monetary Compensation, Procedure Changes and Apologies Can Restore Justice for Observers of Injustice. J Bus Ethics 122, 253–268 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1762-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1762-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation