Procedural Justice, Voice Effects and Sham: Examining the Decision Maker from a Research Context Perspective

ABSTRACT Procedural justice pertains to fairness judgments based on norms of social process involving acceptable behavior and allowance for proper treatment of people (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Research has clearly documented that people perceive procedures are fair when they are given the opportunity to voice their opinions and preferences. While studies clearly support positive effects of voice, there is a gap in the literature regarding negative voice effects. Sham, a negative voice effect, is a procedure that appears to provide the opportunity for voice prior to a decision, but the voice preferences and values are never really considered. Although defined, there was little to no research that shed light on sham and in fact, scholars generally dismissed the notion that organizational decision makers would engage in such a practice. Recent research has established the existence of sham in an organizational context (Potter, in press) and found that perceptions of sham occur prior to the announcement of the decision. This paper discusses how differences in research contexts may have contributed to prior assumptions that sham rarely occurs in organizations. These differences will be discussed by following the Leventhal (1980) framework that outlines six justice rules for determining procedural fairness. Original studies of procedural justice were conducted in courtroom settings that grounded findings in a legal context. Due to the popularity of justice research, the focus shifted from the legal arena to organizations. This paper makes new contributions to the literature by examining decision makers and contrasting the legal and organizational research contexts in order to increase understanding of organizational justice, voice effects and sham. INTRODUCTION Judge: In this courtroom, Mr. Miller, justice is blind to matters of race, creed, color, religion, and sexual orientation. Miller: all due respect your honor, we don't live in this courtroom, though, do we? Judge: No. We don't. This excerpt from the dialogue in Ron Nyswaner's 1993 film Philadelphia provides an excellent example of how individuals contrast expected differences in behavior that would be observed inside versus outside the legal arena. Although our lives do not take place on a movie set, we recognize the dissimilarity between the courtroom and the corporate world. With respect to the courtroom, the initial procedural justice studies primarily concerned the process of adjudication in the European and United States court systems. Thus the research findings were grounded in the legal context. This paper explores how the transition from the legal context to the organizational context may have contained assumptions about decision makers that impacted the procedural justice body of knowledge. Procedural justice research clearly shows that people perceive fairness in procedures and outcomes when they are given the opportunity to voice their opinions and preferences. Therefore voice has been found to have positive effects on individuals' fairness perceptions, even when the outcomes were unfavorable. Although the results have been consistent about positive voice effects, there is a possibility that negative voice effects have been overlooked. The literature contains little to no research that examines negative voice effects. This lack of research creates a gap in knowledge that limits our understanding of voice effects and procedural justice. Due to the legal bindings that accompany a judge's position, researchers could be fairly confident that people would perceive a judge's decision to be trustworthy, non-self serving and unbiased. Although a general assumption exists that a trustworthy organizational decision maker is the norm, deviations may prevail. A departure from the ideal is possible in organizational settings when there is an asymmetrical distribution of outcomes favoring the decision maker rather than the participants. …