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>> 155 7 Hazards of Justice Egocentric Bias, Moral Judgments, and Revenge-Seeking Russell Cropanzano and Carolina Moliner Mike has been working at the same national chain restaurant for 7 years. He is becoming frustrated because even though he has seniority over most of the other employees at the restaurant, he is consistently passed over for promotions . To make matters worse, Mike’s supervisors do not follow the policy and procedure manual meant to be implemented at all chain locations. When asked about his supervisors, Mike typically gets upset and begins to frantically curse and makes accusations about the supervisors engaging in inappropriate relationships with other members of the staff, who inevitably get promotions. Recently, Mike confided in some friends that he has begun stealing money from the bar at the restaurant, and that he frequently engages in time theft by going on “extremely long smoke breaks” behind the restaurant. After informing his friends about this inappropriate behavior, Mike tried to justify the behavior by saying, “If they can do what they want, I can do what I want.” Research has long documented a relationship between workplace fairness and organizational deviance. When individuals are treated unjustly, they tend to retaliate by harming others (for reviews, see Folger, 1993; Folger & Baron, 1996; Tripp & Bies, 2009). This can have pernicious effects on organizations . In one study, Skarlicki and Folger (1997) surveyed 167 manufacturing workers. Those who felt that their jobs lacked fair outcome (distributive justice), fair allocation policies (procedural justice), and fair interpersonal treatment (interactional justice) were more likely to report engaging in a number of retaliatory behaviors. These activities included such behaviors as damaging equipment, taking supplies home, and spreading rumors (see also Skarlicki & Folger, 2004). Other studies have reported similar results. People who perceive that they were unfairly treated are prone to commit acts of sabotage (Ambrose, Seabright & Schminke, 2002) and vandalism (DeMoore, Fisher & Baron, 1988). They may also become more aggressive toward others (Hershcovis, Turner, Barling, Arnold, Dupré, Inness, LeBlanc & Sivanathan, 2007). 156 > 157 these philosophical models can yield different prescriptions for fair conduct (Sandel, 2009). The normative approach to fairness is venerable and influential, but it is not the paradigm used by most social scientific inquiry into justice. Social scientists take a descriptive approach to fairness. This area of study seeks to determine what people believe to be fair through the use of scientific theory and empirical exploration (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel & Rupp, 2001). This approach answers a different set of questions than does the normative tradition . Social scientists are concerned with how people form fairness judgments , as well as the consequences of these evaluations. This empirical paradigm supplies most of the material for this chapter. At its core, the descriptive approach treats “justice” as if it were a judgment or evaluation (see van den Bos & Lind, 2002; van den Bos, Lind & Wilke, 2001). Something is fair or unfair because a person or group deems it to be. This creates a problem for organizations. Just as philosophers do not always agree as to what constitutes fairness, workers will not all agree when a given policy or resource allocation is just. Furthermore, human judgments often depart from rationality (Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002) and our thinking can be biased in systematic ways (Moore & Flynn, 2008). Given all this, we would expect certain problems to emerge in judgments of fairness and for these to create subsequent disagreements among employees. Everyone will not be of the same mind. We do not all use the same standards and our thinking may not be careful and deliberate. To explore how these issues create workplace deviance, we will here consider three sets of research findings. First, we argue that there is a self-serving and egocentric bias that causes us to believe that our preferred positions are fairer than others deem them to be. Second, when individuals are making person perception judgments they often weigh bad behaviors quite heavily . Hence, we are slow to revise our (negative) opinions of others. Third, we argue that people often respond to injustice by seeking revenge, even though doing so may not be economically rational. Egocentric Biases in Justice Judgments Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. —Francis Bacon According to Francis Bacon, we often see things as we wish they were rather than as is objectively the case. This has been especially well documented in judgments pertaining to the self (Kruegar, 1998). For example, most people 158 > 159 Self-Serving Justice Perceptions and Negotiation If we each see fairness egocentrically, then it could make it...

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