Organizational justice in disciplinary processes: Roles of procedure, equity, and attribution

This study examined perceptions of justice in the context of discipline. The literature of distributive justice suggested that matching of severity levels between causal events and disciplinary actions is essential for the presence of justice. Research in procedural justice implied that arbitration procedure is preferred to autocratic procedure as the fair procedure for punitive decision making. Studies on attribution theory suggested that people perceive justice in discipline when the punished fault is attributed internally to the problem worker. Four variables were investigated in terms of their interaction effects on perceived justice: causal event, disciplinary action, procedure, and locus of responsibility. Data were collected from 140 human resource specialists employed by U.S. organizations. Subjects rated the degree of justice on ten scales by reviewing hypothetical disciplinary cases presented in vignettes. Overall tests and simple effect tests in multivariate and univariate analyses of covariance were performed to test these four hypotheses. Results show that hypothesis 1, predicting the interaction between the procedural component and distributive component, was rejected. Because the procedural characteristic and distributive characteristic had independent effects on perceived justice, the traditional dichotomy of distributive justice and procedural justice seemed to exist in a pure, independent fashion. Hypothesis 2, that posited a joint effect of equity and responsibility, was supported partly. Results indicated that inflicting severe discipline on externally caused minor misconduct was judged very unfair, suggesting that the effect of equity distribution on perceived justice was conditional on the locus of responsibility. The importance of an equity relationship on the perceived justice was predicted in hypothesis 3 and was partly supported by the evidence. An appearance of an ordinal cause-action interaction effect that was unpredicted by equity could be explained by cognitive rationalization, progressive discipline, and antagonistic reaction. Hypothesis 4 that assumed a conditional relationship of procedure on the locus of responsibility was rejected by the nonsignificant interaction effect between these variables. In addition to hypothesis testing, this study explored the main effects of the study variables. Observed main effects suggested the importance of progressive discipline, forgiveness of minor fault, and arbitration procedure in making discipline fair.