MLDR 6010 Week 10 Organizational Justice Review Example

Same Facts, Different Employee: An Equity Review That Reruns a Lead Selection and a Conduct Response Through Distributive, Procedural and Interactional Justice and Finds One Uncomfortable Answer

Student Name

Walden University

MLDR 6010: Managing People and Promoting

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Same Facts, Different Employee: An Equity Review That Reruns a Lead Selection and a Conduct Response Through Distributive, Procedural and Interactional Justice and Finds One Uncomfortable Answer

The Decisions and Their Substitutes

Two decisions taken this term at our Westerville clinic are under review here. The first is the appointment of Andrea as lead technician over Kelsey and Marcus. Its substitute candidate is a part-time technician with the same skills as Kelsey; the question is whether a part-timer would have met the selection on equal terms. The second is the conduct response for Dr. Haines, a written warning with coaching. Its substitute is a technician who behaved exactly as Dr. Haines did; the question is whether that technician would have been offered coaching too. Each substitute was chosen before I examined the decisions, so I could not pick whichever comparison produced a comfortable answer.

Distributive Justice

Distributive justice asks whether outcomes matched contributions, a question that goes back to the equity theory of Adams (1965). For the selection, the outcome was a lead role and a pay increase for Andrea and a development plan for Kelsey. The contributions the role required were set in advance: scheduling, delegation, staying at the board and logs. On those, Andrea's exercise outcome was stronger, so the outcome matched the stated contributions. A part-time technician with Kelsey's skills would face the same comparison, and the outcome would be the same. For the conduct response, the outcome for Dr. Haines is a warning and coaching. The outcomes for the three technicians who resigned were departures, with no change in their working conditions while they stayed. Measured against what each party contributed to the problem, the technicians bore costs they did not cause.

Procedural Justice

Leventhal (1980) set out six tests of procedural fairness, and the table applies each to both decisions. The table checks both decisions against each.

The swap does its work in the first row. When I imagined the same raised voice coming from a technician aimed at a veterinarian, I checked the chain's corrective action log for the last two years. Four technicians had been referred directly to the formal conduct process for comparable or milder conduct, such as raising a voice at a client or a veterinarian, without any coaching step first. No veterinarian had been. The selection passes the consistency rule, because the part-time substitute would have taken the same exercise. The conduct response fails it.

Table 1

Both Decisions Against Leventhal's Rules

Composite clinic. Chain records refer to the regional corrective action log for the last two years.

Interactional Justice

Bies and Moag (1986) describe interactional justice as the fairness of how decisions are communicated: whether people are treated with respect and given honest, adequate explanations. The selection does reasonably well on this lens. Kelsey heard the decision first, in person, with reasons tied to criteria she could check. The conduct response does less well for the technicians. They were told only that action was being taken, which protects Dr. Haines's privacy but leaves them unable to judge whether their concerns were heard. Colquitt et al. (2001) found in a meta-analysis that informational justice, the adequacy of explanations, was related to employees' trust and evaluations of authority figures, which suggests the technicians' limited information carries a real cost.

Recommendation

I recommend one change to process: a threshold rule for conduct cases that applies by conduct, not by role. Any conduct described in Section 4.2 of the handbook that a manager personally observes on two occasions will lead to a written warning reviewed by regional HR, whoever the employee is, and any further incident will lead to a formal referral. Under this rule, Dr. Haines receives the same written warning he is already receiving under the revised Week 8 proposal, but the reason is stated as the threshold, not as his seniority. A technician behaving as he did would receive the same warning and the same coaching instead of an immediate referral. The rule closes the consistency failure without pretending it never happened.

What This Review Does Not Settle

The review cannot say whether the four technicians referred in the past were treated too harshly or whether Dr. Haines is being treated too gently; it shows only that the two were treated differently for comparable conduct. That finding is uncomfortable because the decision under review was mine.

References

Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 2, 267-299. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60108-2

Bies, R. J., & Moag, J. F. (1986). Interactional justice: Communication criteria of fairness. In R. J. Lewicki, B. H. Sheppard, & M. H. Bazerman (Eds.), Research on negotiation in organizations (Vol. 1, pp. 43-55). JAI Press.

Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425

Leventhal, G. S. (1980). What should be done with equity theory? New approaches to the study of fairness in social relationships. In K. J. Gergen, M. S. Greenberg, & R. H. Willis (Eds.), Social exchange: Advances in theory and research (pp. 27-55). Plenum Press.