Dirk D. Steiner – författare

At the 1998 annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, we organized a roundtable discussion session titled “Innovating organizational justice: Cultural, value, and stakeholders’ perspectives.” We were impressed by the high level of discussion that this session generated and decided to try to continue the discussion in a conference devoted to these issues. In the summer of 1999, approximately 20 scholars from seven nations met for two days in Nice, France. The theme of the “International Roundtable” on organizational justice was “Innovating research on organizational justice.” The format of the meeting allowed for extensive discussion of each of the papers that were presented.

A strong feeling that emerged from this meeting was that organizational justice research has much to contribute to our understanding of people at work. Further, our current research on organizational justice and the application of justice to managerial issues has in some ways been limited by the confines of our academic journals. The papers presented and discussed at the Nice roundtable clearly extended scholarly thinking in new and exciting directions. We invited a subset of the authors who presented their research at this meeting to submit their papers for review for the first volume of our newly developed series Research in Social Issues in Management. All papers were reviewed independently by organizational justice scholars.

The chapters in this volume offer new and innovative ways to view values related to fairness, as well as work-related values, their antecedents and consequences. All have been peer reviewed prior to their publication. This volume consists of two parts. The first part focuses on value-based theories in organizations. The papers in this section address issues such as how to define, classify and study values; how values influence fairness by influencing what people believe what they deserve; how one’s own identity relates to fairness perceptions, and how values and norms affect the way that people perceive or construe events.

This volume covers such topics as Developing Theories of Fairness Motivation; Development of Justice Integration Theory; and The Roles of Empathy, Self-esteem, and Moral Development in Interactional Fairness.

This book is divided into three parts: integrating the non-work context into theories of organizational justice; non-work reactions to injustice; and commentary.

This volume of Research in Social Issues in Management critically examines theoretical underpinnings of organizational justice and corporate social responsibility by identifying motives underlying desires for justice and by considering responses to injustice. The first set of chapters explores issues of morality, emotions, and social exchange relationships. These can be seen as engines that drive reactions to organizational justice. The second set of chapters addresses injustice and recovery, the social systems surrounding justice, and the application of justice principles to organizations’ environmental and sustainability practices. A commentary chapter highlights ten themes that cross this interesting collection of paper on Justice, Morality, and Social Responsibility.

This volume in Research in Social Issues in Management expands our understanding of organizational justice and applies justice theories to develop models of ethical behavior in organizations. At a time of global economic recession and frequent business and accounting scandals, many people are questioning the ethics of business leaders. Whether these challenges are actual or perceived, models grounded in organizational justice theories provide powerful insights and suggest new ways of looking at leadership ethics. By examining what it means to be just and examining relationships between justice and ethicality, the chapters in this volume have provided conceptual models for understanding ethical challenges facing organizations.

The chapters are organized around two related themes. The first theme is expanding models of organizational justice. After 30 years of research, a natural question is whether we have reached the useful limits in developing theories of organizational justice. The clear answer you will see after reading these chapters is no, as each chapter pushes our thinking in new directions. The second theme is applying organizational justice theories to develop models of ethical and unethical behavior in organizations. The models address topics of greed, dehumanization, and moral contracts.

This eighth volume in the Research in Social Issues in Management series explores a variety of social relations to expand our thinking about organizational justice, which is fundamentally based on relationships between organizational authorities and the employees of the organizations. These relationships also emphasize the roles of various actors and suggest fairness perspectives other than that of subordinates’ perceptions of the treatment received from their superiors.

The 10 chapters of the volume are divided into two major sections plus a conclusion. The first section presents five chapters that bring new theoretical perspectives to bear on justice considerations. Topics treated throughout this section include conflicting perspectives on justice, psychological distance, greed, and punishment. The second section places emphasis on leaders’ or managers’ perspectives of justice, going back to some of the initial proactive roots of justice rather than on what has become the more traditional focus, that of subordinate perceptions or reactive justice. In the contributions comprising this section, leaders’ personalities, their motives, and their position as both superiors of some employees and subordinates of their own superiors are examined to provide new perspectives on the leadership role in justice matters.

The concluding chapter, by Brockner and Carter, comments on the collection of chapters and proposes extensions and alternative perspectives for consideration. This commentary chapter suggests that the volume surfs a fifth wave in the history of justice research as these chapters all examine justice as a dependent variable influenced by numerous factors.

This volume provides up-to-date reviews of the research on a number of social and ethical issues of increasing concern confronting today''s managers and organizations. The authors, who are recognized international experts on the topics they treat, provide new theories and innovative perspectives on these issues. Further, they use a research base to identify ways for managers and human resources professionals to address these issues in their organizations. Given its breadth of coverage, practitioners faced with these issues, as well as researchers and graduate students in management and organizational psychology, should find this volume of interest. This collection of ten chapters provides the cutting edge on a number of the most pressing challenges in management today. Readers of the volume will discover new models, innovative theoretical approaches, comprehensive reviews, theoretical and methodological critiques, and specific and insightful suggestions for research on these different social and ethical issues facing organizations. Perhaps more importantly, the practical suggestions that come from the research provide a useful bridge between what we know and what we can do to address these challenges, and thus contribute, even in a small way, to workplaces that respect ethics and individuals in all their diversity.

This volume covers such topics as Developing Theories of Fairness Motivation; Development of Justice Integration Theory; and The Roles of Empathy, Self-esteem, and Moral Development in Interactional Fairness.