Cultivating an Image of Justice: Looking Fair on the Job

C ertainly, it would appear that being fair is a central interest among today's managers, concerned as they must be about providing "equal employment opportunities," adhering to "fair labor practices," and offering "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." Just as judges promote fairness in the legal system, and referees and umpires ensure that sporting events are played fairly, managers are responsible for upholding both their company's and society's views of fairness by guaranteeing the fair treatment of employees.1 Despite this, however, it remains unclear what those responsible for the day-to-day management of organizations think constitutes fair behavior. Not surprisingly, just as legal scholars and philosophers cannot agree on what fairness really is in any absolute sense, social scientists have relied on studying justice as it is perceived to be that is, what is fair is in the eye of the beholder.2 In organizations, where the differing perspectives, interests, and goals of supervisors and subordinates might offer each access to different sources of information (as well as different biases on the same information), uncertainties about what is perceived to be fair are likely to arise.3 As a result, we may expect that seasoned managers trying to be fair may learn to focus on what others believe to be fair, thereby cultivating an impression of fairness rather than striving toward any abstract sense of morality. Indeed, when interviewing executives on the topic of organizational justice, I learned that in business organizations fairness was often a matter of impression-management. As one senior vice-president of a Fortune 500 firm confided in me, "What's fair is whatever the workers think is fair. My job is to convince them that what's good for the company is fair for them as individuals." Hearing this sentiment echoed by others, I began to suspect that fairness as viewed by corporate management was perhaps as much a matter of image as it was a matter of morality; that is, "looking fair" may be at least as important as actually "being fair." After all, even the best-intentioned, most "fair-minded" manager may fail to win the approval of subordinates who are not convinced of his or her fairness. Given this, we may ask the following two questions: (1) Are managers more concerned about looking fair or actually being fair? and (2) What do managers do to cultivate impressions of fairness? The Importance of Looking Fair: Survey Evidence