| Individuals must often try to assess organizational decisions that have uncertain consequences. Decades of research have pointed to the importance of procedural fairness judgments in explaining people's reactions to decisions and support for the authorities that make them. A decision theoretic analysis, in contrast, focuses on a person's prediction of the consequences of the decision. This dissertation explores the relationship between fairness judgments, future outcome predictions, and uncertainty in one's ability to predict outcomes, in governing reactions to organizational decisions.; Drawing from behavioral decision theory concepts of uncertainty and building off recent work by Lind and Van den Bos, I test two forms of the relationship between fairness and uncertainty. First, I test the capacity for procedural fairness judgments to influence expectations of uncertain future events. In both an experiment where students predict their final grade (Study 1) and a field survey of MBA students assessing future job prospects (Study 2), favorable fairness judgments led to greater confidence in knowledge concerning the predicted outcomes and less negative reported feelings of uncertainty.; Second, I test the extent to which people's uncertainty about their knowledge moderates the impact of fairness judgments and the impact of outcome predictions on support for an impending policy. In both an experiment (Study 3) and longitudinal field survey (Study 4) concerning a real proposed public policy, only individuals with low knowledge were found to be sensitive to fairness judgments in determining their support for the policy, whereas people with high knowledge used their outcome prediction instead. Moreover, the effects of fairness are reduced [or enhanced] as people report increased [or decreased] certainty in their level of knowledge over time. Based on these findings I raise several empirical questions for the success of organizational change management initiatives and highlight potential connections to other process-outcome effects in decision making more broadly. |
