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Perceptions of organizational fairness have been found to predict important organizational outcomes, including employee loyalty (Schaubroeck, May, & Brown, 1994), commitment (Folger & Konovsky, 1989), and extra role behavior (Moormam, 1991). Studies also show a significant relationship between injustice and negative organizational outcomes, such as retaliatory behaviors (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997), theft (Greenberg, 1990), and rule breaking (Tyler, 1990). Although research in organizational justice has made considerable advances in the past three decades, these studies have taken place predominately in North America. We know relatively less about how employees from other countries make fairness judgements and react to their perceptions. By assuming that our current understanding of work‐place fairness is universal, we overlook the deep cultural differences that can exist between people of different nations.

Proposes that organizational fairness is a psychological mechanism that can mediate employee resistance to change. Focuses on resentment‐based resistance as a subset of all possible resistance behaviors. Uses referent cognitions theory to explain why organizational change not only increases employees’ sensitivity to fairness, but also why change is frequently perceived as a loss. Recent theoretical and empirical research is presented that suggests if researchers and managers focus on the effects of any one of these three types of justice (i.e. distributive, procedural or interactional justice), they might fail to address resistance adequately. Examines how the three forms of justice interact to predict resistance to change, and provides some implications of this interaction effect for change managers.

Effects of voice, compensation, and responsibility attribution on justice perception and post‐complaint behavior in a consumer setting were studied in a cross‐cultural study. Hotel school students in China and Canada (N = 168) read and responded to a scenario which described how a service provider handled the complaint from a customer whose coat was stained with tea. The results showed that collectivists were more likely than individualists to blame the service provider. Also, voice offered by the service provider failed to reduce its blame, and compensation actually led to more blame attributed to the service provider. Responsibility attribution was found to be able to mediate the effect of culture on post complaint behavior. A culture by voice interaction indicated that when voice was offered by the service provider, Canadians were less likely to attribute the responsibility to themselves than were Chinese. The implications of these results on justice, culture, and responsibility attribution are discussed.

We examined relationships between distributive, procedural, and interactional justice and two types of organization‐directed reactions—organizational commitment and turnover intention—across two employee samples each from the U.S. and Bangladesh. Regression analyses of questionnaire data indicated that the three forms of justice were related to the organization‐directed reactions of both the U.S. and Bangladesh employees. The specific nature of the justice relationships varied primarily when comparing employees across the four samples, rather than across the two countries.

This study compares the role of procedural justice in motivating organizational retaliatory behaviors between two employee samples, one American and the other Taiwanese. The cross‐national generality of procedural justice effects on retaliation are examined with regard to three issues. First, this study considers the comparability of the link between procedural justice and retaliation between the two national samples. Second, it examines whether procedural justice effects on retaliation are mediated by organizational identity in both samples, as has been found in previous research based on U.S. employees (Tyler & Blader, 2000). Third, it investigates whether procedural justice is defined similarly in the two samples. Results indicate moderate cultural variation in the influence of procedural justice on retaliation and in the mediating role of organizational identity. Specifically, although procedural justice was slightly less predictive of retaliation among the Taiwanese sample, the association between justice and retaliation for these respondents was fully (as opposed to partially) mediated by organizational identity. Significant national differences also emerged in the meaning of procedural justice. Taiwanese employees demonstrated a balanced influence of relational and instrumental concerns when making overall procedural fairness perceptions, while U.S. employees defined procedural fairness primarily in terms of relational concerns.

Because justice is inherently norm‐based, understanding people's perceptions of fairness in organizations requires considering the prevailing cultural standards in which those organizations operate. Social scien‐tists study cross‐cultural differences in justice primarily to comprehend the connection between culture and fairness, providing insight into the different meanings of justice around the world, and to assess the generalizability of culture‐bound organizational justice phenomena. The present studies focus on assessing generalizability, but fall short of doing so optimally because they suffer from several conceptual and methodo‐logical problems that are endemic in this literature. Cross‐cultural research suggests that although concerns about justice may be universal, operationalization of justice standards is highly particularistic. Finally, I address Gallon's Problem as it pertains to justice—that is, how observed connections between culture and justice perceptions may be inflated spuriously because of inevitable cultural diffusion. In closing, I note that the present research appears to be aimed more squarely at theory‐development rather than theory‐testing, which is appropriate, given the current state of the literature.

In this chapter, we examine employee prosocial rule breaking as a response to organizations’ unfair treatment of customers. Drawing on the deontic perspective and research on third-party reactions to unfairness, we suggest employees engage in customer-directed prosocial rule breaking when they believe their organizations’ policies treat customers unfairly. Additionally, we consider employee, customer, and situational characteristics that enhance or inhibit the relationship between employees’ perceptions of organizational policy unfairness and customer-directed prosocial rule breaking.

Incivility is widespread in the workplace and has been shown to have significant affective and behavioral consequences. However, the authors still have a limited understanding as to whether, how and when discrete incivility events impact team performance. Adopting a resource depletion perspective and focusing on the cognitive implications of such events, the authors introduce a multi-level model linking the adverse effects of such events on team members’ working memory – the “workbench” of the cognitive system where most planning, analyses, and management of goals occur – to team effectiveness. The model which the authors develop proposes that that uncivil interpersonal behavior in general, and rudeness – a central manifestation of incivility – in particular, may place a significant drain on individuals’ working memory capacity, affecting team effectiveness via its effects on individual performance and coordination-related team emergent states and action-phase processes. In the context of this model, the authors offer an overarching framework for making sense of disparate findings regarding how, why and when incivility affects performance outcomes at multiple levels. More specifically, the authors use this framework to: (a) suggest how individual-level cognitive impairment and weakened coordinative team processes may mediate these incivility-based effects, and (b) explain how event, context, and individual difference factors moderators may attenuate or exacerbate these cognition-mediated effects.

This chapter examines aggression at work perpetrated by individual insiders by bringing together streams of research that have often been examined separately. A comparison of the similarities and differences of aggression toward individuals, such as verbal abuse or physical attack, and aggression toward organizations, such as embezzlement or work slowdowns, is shown to provide important insights about the causes and consequences of workplace aggression. We propose a comprehensive model based on the integration of prior theoretical treatments and empirical findings. The model attempts to offer a framework to systematically examine psychological and organizational mechanisms underlying workplace aggression, and to explain the reasons why workplace violence policies and procedures sometimes fail. A set of research propositions is also suggested to assist in achieving this end in future research.

Empathy, or the process of feeling or knowing how another feels, is a critical component of social interactions, and may be of particular importance to organizational functioning. This chapter addresses a literature gap on empathy in organizational contexts by providing a review of empathy research in a management setting.

We integrate the developing field of empathy research and provide a conceptual framework built on Ashkanasy’s (2003) five levels of analysis in emotions research, emphasizing within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group-level, and organization-level processes.

Our model addresses the complaint that empathy definitions are not consistent by illustrating how the level of analysis alters the view of empathy’s role in organizations.

This multi-level model of empathy provides a framework to identify gaps in the empathy literature and make recommendations for future research.

This new model of empathy will help practitioners use and understand empathy by providing a structure of how empathy is manifested in organizational settings.

The field of empathy research has been limited by inconsistent definitions and a lack of a model that outlines how empathy is used in organizations. This multi-level model of empathy provides the necessary framework for researchers and practitioners to advance the research and practice of empathy in organizations.