FINDING THE FAIRNESS FORMULA
Mendoza researchers say that in business and in life, how well you fare has a lot to do with how well you’re fair.
For my kids, it happened around age 3.
Somehow, they learned a certain four-letter word. It begins with F. I can’t say how they learned it. (I don’t think it was from me.) But it suddenly took over their vocabulary. Henceforth, they’d insist on trotting this word out in protest each time they were upset or angry about a decision.
The word — usually preceded by “no” — was “fair.”
Jason Colquitt, the Franklin D. Schurz Professor of Management at Mendoza College of Business, assures me my kids’ experience is normal.
“Our sense of unfairness is one of the first forms of displeasure we experience,” he said. “Almost as soon as we can speak a full sentence, we learn to say, ‘That’s not fair.’”
While it might be childlike to be fascinated by the word “fair,” there’s nothing childish about our overall concern for fairness, Colquitt said.
“What kids’ early interest in fairness tells us is just how fundamental our sense of fairness is. Even when we know almost nothing about society and how it operates, we know at a very visceral level what it means for something to be unfair.”
So perhaps it is no surprise, then, that long after we have given up screaming “no fair” when things don’t go our way, our underlying and often unspoken sense of fairness remains a major factor that shapes our lives and especially our careers.
Colquitt, one of the world’s leading experts on fairness in work contexts, said that our sense of whether we are treated fairly shapes how well we perform at work. It also affects whether we decide to stay in a job. It even has a demonstrated impact on our overall health and well-being.
Colquitt’s work, which has been cited more than 60,000 times by other scholars, has been a major force in building a detailed picture that displays all of the consequences of fair and unfair treatment in the workplace. And it all began with Colquitt’s most influential publication which was the first to formulate in a satisfactory way what causes an employee to see treatment as fair in the first place.
His work has not only identified what shapes our perceptions of fair treatment. It has also yielded an array of practical suggestions for integrating more fairness into our lives and our leadership.
On Justice and Toothbrushes
Colquitt’s journey toward finding the formula that underlies our perceptions of fairness began by accident. Like many great quests, it kicked off while he was looking for something else entirely.
It started while he was writing his honors thesis for his undergraduate degree in psychology at Indiana University. He got the idea to write his thesis about brainstorming. He sought out psychology professor Jerome Chertkoff to serve as his advisor. He pitched his idea: “What if, after all that time spent in a room brainstorming about some problem, the group offered their solution to the boss, but the boss said, ‘Eh ... we’re not doing that.’ How would the group react?”
Chertkoff ruminated and finally replied, “I like that idea. But it’s not a brainstorming idea. It’s a justice idea.” Now, three decades later, Colquitt recognizes that statement as the one that launched his career.
After graduation, Colquitt entered the Ph.D. in Management program at Michigan State University. Even as he branched out to explore other research ideas, questions about fairness remained in the background. After taking his first faculty job at the University of Florida, he was ready to make an ambitious attempt to bring together all of the elements that lead an employee to consider a particular event fair or not fair into a single measure.
“Imagine an employee walks out of a meeting with her boss and leaves saying to herself, ‘That wasn’t fair,’” Colquitt said. “That overall judgment comes from a combination of different things that are all tossed together like ingredients in a salad bowl. But scholars at the time didn’t have a way to adequately label and measure them.”
Until management scholars could agree on a fairness formula, they were like chemists without a periodic table of elements. They could speak about justice, but there was no guarantee they were studying the same thing. Thus, even as study after study appeared on the topic, it was not clear that the field of management as a whole was making real shared progress on the subject of fairness.
The lack of a shared measure and definition was not due to a lack of trying. Other scholars had tried to formulate the elements of fairness before. In fact, the problem was that there were too many ways to measure fairness or “organizational justice,” as scholars call it. Scholars tended to come up with their own preferred measures for organizational justice, resulting in a situation that one psychologist recently called a “toothbrush problem”: each scholar used only his or her own; no one wanted to use anyone else’s.
Most measures recognize in one way or another that fairness involves questions about allocating resources: It matters that people get the money or other benefits that are due to them. But from there, agreement tended to break down. Some measures suggested fairness was made up of two dimensions. Others included three. Scholars continued to use their own work but had little success in convincing the field as a whole that they had captured organizational justice adequately.
For years, Colquitt had been watching as new ways of measuring organizational justice emerged. In 2001, he conducted a comprehensive review of all the scholarly work on the subject and published it alongside a new measure that suggested organizational justice consisted of four main factors.
To determine the validity of his measure, Colquitt applied it in two very different settings. The first was in a university classroom setting and the second was in a work setting with more than 300 employees at an automotive parts manufacturing company.
In the classroom setting, fairness had to do with grades, instructors’ processes and their treatment of students. At the auto parts manufacturer, fairness had to do with pay, promotions, supervisors’ decisions and their interactions with employees
After gathering data in both settings, Colquitt was able to confirm that his measure fit both settings and would be generalizable to other types of organizations and contexts.
The long period of study, incubation and waiting paid off. Other scholars were convinced. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the study has influenced over 10,000 subsequent studies and remains the most-used measure for anyone conducting research in the field.
For Colquitt, it was the equivalent in management research to a chemist characterizing a new molecule for the first time.
“Scholars today might argue over the complexities of justice, but it remains clear that it is some combination of procedural justice, distributive justice, interpersonal justice and informational justice in some particular context.”
Colquitt explains the elements of his measure using a conversation about compensation as an example.
“If I leave my boss’s office after talking about a raise, and I say, ‘That wasn’t fair,’ I might mean several different things or a combination of things,” he explained.
...“I might mean the raise wasn’t as high as my performance warrants. If that’s the case, I’m talking about distributive justice. But what if my boss was using inaccurate information or wasn’t being consistent with how others have been treated? Those things are procedural justice. What if my boss refused to explain the raise decision or talked in vague terms that didn’t really explain anything? That’s informational justice. Finally, what if in the meeting the boss was simply rude or said things that were inappropriate or disrespectful? That’s interpersonal justice.”
The power of Colquitt’s measure was synthesizing all of these elements together in a package researchers could use. By administering a survey with 20 questions, they could gain a score that told them how fair a particular employee considered an event or decision to be. [See the questions in the sidebar.]
For the field of management science, Colquitt’s measure enabled a new research stream to develop. Scholars began using the measure to track how employees’ perceptions of particular events combined and formed an overall perception of the fairness of a boss or organization. Scholars could then determine what effects these perceptions had over time.
The Far Reach of Fairness
Decades later, Colquitt will not say that fairness is the single most decisive thing in shaping a person’s career, but he said it’s safe to say, “It’s on the Mount Rushmore of decisive things.”
Studies have been able to prove that an employee’s perception of whether they work for a fair or unfair company affects an employee’s willingness to leave a company. And according to Colquitt, this fact has drawn the most interest from companies looking to apply his research.
“Most managers care a lot about turnover, but they don’t always realize what a central role fairness plays,” he said. “The most basic insight is that if you want to keep people, think about fairness. It’s not just a matter of pay or perks; there are also the other aspects of fair treatment to consider. And if you’re having a problem with too much turnover, you should think carefully about questions of fairness in a very holistic way.”
Fairness does more than shape whether we stay or stray from a job. It also affects how we perform. Studies have shown that employees who see their workplace as fair are more likely to engage in what researchers call organizational citizenship behaviors. These are actions that would not show up in a typical job description but nevertheless have a major impact on the organization’s success. They include helping others, being courteous, voicing suggestions for change and demonstrating a good attitude, even when conditions are difficult.
When we believe our workplace is unfair, we are more likely to engage in the dark counterparts of organizational citizenship behaviors, which scholars know as counterproductive work behaviors. These include theft, sabotage, fraud, absenteeism and others. These behaviors are difficult to control and prevent through formal means, and they are a major threat to the life of the organization.
Putting Your Fairest Foot Forward
Colquitt’s work suggests that we are always attuned to questions of fairness. Our sense of fairness is always ticking away like a Geiger counter, forming impressions of how fairly we have been treated in each event or situation we encounter. Still, some moments matter more than others. Beginnings matter in particular.
“When you’re a new employee, you’re very motivated to try to figure out whether this new place is a fair place,” Colquitt said. “You’re extremely observant in every meeting, and you scrutinize every announcement in the first weeks and months that you’re in an organization. Over time, your perception hardens and stabilizes.”
Colquitt’s advice, then, is to establish trust early while the trust Geiger counter is at its most sensitive.
“It’s always better to build trust than repair trust, and it’s especially difficult after that window of sensitivity closes,” he advised.
Fairness Isn’t Free
If fairness has so many tangible benefits, why do we so regularly fail to take the right actions to realize them? For the most part, Colquitt said, managers do want to be fair. They even intend to be fair. The issue is that it takes time to be fair. The most common threat to fairness is not a conniving boss but a careless one.
A lot of unfairness comes from cutting corners rather than from intentional injustice.
This insight, he says, can help us think through when and when not to use artificial intelligence.
As AI and other forms of automation find their way into more and more work processes, organizations are not wrong to worry about broad issues of unfairness such as discrimination and algorithmic bias, Colquitt said. But he also advises organizations to think about missed opportunities.
“AI might be a helpful addition in certain cases,” Colquitt said, “but we have to use it intentionally with a clear goal of being fair.” He used the example of sending out rejection emails, as he often has to do for scores of applicants vying for a spot in Mendoza’s Ph.D. in Management program. “One danger is that in an effort to be efficient, we might use AI to help us draft and send messages without attending to concerns about fairness. However, fairness will always involve a great deal of care and craftsmanship. I spend the time to be personal and share feedback because I believe that is what we owe applicants who have taken the time to consider us and apply. I recognize it would be easy not to do that. Some automation can help collect and deliver those messages efficiently. But a fully automated system will engineer the fairness out of the process.”
“For me, the point is that although it takes time and energy to be fair, it does make sense for us and for the organization. Some organizations seem to believe that more and more people using AI will diminish our expectation of being treated fairly. But if you’re not going the extra mile to treat people fairly, you’re leaving an arrow in your quiver and not being as effective over the long term as you could be.”
Formulated, Not Formulaic
During Colquitt’s time at the University of Florida, he advised many Ph.D. students who went on to forge their own careers studying organizational justice. When Colquitt joined Mendoza College of Business in 2020, he also became colleagues with one of his former doctoral students, Cindy Muir (Zapata), who had joined the previous year.
Muir, a professor in the Department of Management & Organization, has made a name for herself in her own right studying organizational justice. She conducts research that explores fairness not only from employees’ perspectives but also from the perspectives of bosses.
“I was fascinated by the fact that in a given interaction, an employee might focus on how he or she was treated unfairly, and the boss might focus on the fact that they did all they could to be fair — and it turns out both of those things can be true,” Muir said.
Muir believes that although most bosses likely intend to be fair, communication breakdowns threaten their ability to display this to employees. An important disconnect results because bosses think their intentions are clear to employees when they may not be.
Muir said a common problem arises when bosses and employees simply have too few touchpoints to create the right shared understanding. For example, one good intention that often goes wrong is when bosses don’t want to impose on or bother their employees.
“They want to keep employees free to be productive, so they might not schedule as many one-on-one meetings as they should,” said Muir. “They might think that employees have a ‘no news is good news’ outlook on their performance. But this creates an unintended problem where interactions skew negative if bosses reach out mainly when there is a problem. Intentionally making time for positive touch points provides an opportunity for bosses to show that they genuinely care about the employee.”
Muir’s work has highlighted that fairness always takes place within a relationship and involves a complex and ongoing process of communication. She has found, for example, that employees perceive their bosses as fair not just when bosses treat them fairly but in particular when bosses do so for the right reasons.
For her, the key to fairness is prosociality.
“We can talk about a formula or recipe for what fairness entails, but it’s also key to recognize it’s not only about checking specific boxes. Your approach should be tweaked for each person — for the way they like to be recognized and appreciated, for what matters most to them — that other-focus is key.”
Grievance and Governance
In January of this year, the public relations firm Edelman released its annual “Trust Barometer,” a report, now in its 25th year, that explores how much the public trusts institutions, leaders and experts. This year, the report highlighted a new term: grievance. The report showed that 61% of people globally now have a moderate sense of grievance, meaning that they believe that the institutions that make up society are fundamentally unfair.
Down the hall from Colquitt and Muir, John Busenbark is studying the topsy-turvy set of incentives this deep sense of unfairness creates for businesses and their leaders. Busenbark, the Mary Jo and Richard M. Kovacevich Associate Professor of Management & Organization, said it is part of a very recent development in business history.
“We have seen a major shift in the conventional wisdom about what we expect from business leaders in just the past five or six years,” he said.
Busenbark pointed out that for most of the past century, the main expectation is that businesses exist to create profits for shareholders. Corporate boards are formed largely to support this aim: They provide oversight and ensure that CEOs remain accountable to shareholders. But in recent years, as trust in the government and the media has waned, CEOs have increasingly developed their own independent voice on social issues — often responding to demands from customers and from their own employees.
Busenbark studied what happened in 2016 when many CEOs joined the opposition to the North Carolina “Bathroom Bill,” a piece of legislation requiring people to use the bathroom matching the sex on their birth certificate. He and his collaborators found that, for the most part, employees welcomed their CEOs’ involvement on the issue. Even many conservative CEOs signed on to a letter opposing the bill, largely in an effort to win the admiration of their employees. Corporate boards, on the other hand, tended to react very differently.
“Boards tend to regard CEOs with skepticism and tend to be less likely to be impressed with these moves, especially when they don’t have a clear connection to the bottom line,” Busenbark said. “As soon as there aren’t financial returns, the CEO gets fired.”
“It’s important for CEOs and other executives to navigate this new landscape carefully,” Busenbark advised, “and recognize that different stakeholders now hold fundamentally different ideas of what businesses and their leaders owe to them.”
How long the crisis of grievance will last and how deep it will go is anyone’s guess, Busenbark said, but for his part, he hopes we learn two lessons.
The first is that distrust might seem like the obvious choice, but it can often be extremely costly.
“We think trust is too risky,” Busenbark said, “but radical mistrust is risky too.”
Shareholders and the public are sometimes right to worry that top executives will act in their own interest at the expense of others. However, it is important not to overcorrect.
“If we distrust top executives too much, we can place too many constraints on their behavior. We may actually undermine their ability to benefit their stakeholders and the communities where their firms are situated,” Busenbark said.
That’s why Busenbark’s second lesson is to develop a more balanced assessment of business leaders.
“Much of the public thinks of CEOs as fundamentally different from the rest of us in either positive or negative ways,” Busenbark said. “But CEOs aren’t superhuman; they are more like the rest of us than most people think. For the most part, they want to do what’s right and try to do so while facing a lot of competing demands that are difficult to appreciate from the outside.”
Filling the Trust Bucket
When asked about the crisis of grievance in society and the pressure it puts on leaders, Colquitt and Muir insisted that although the bucket of trust seems to have dried up in our society, there’s only one way to fill it: one drop at a time.
“The good news and the bad news is that the principles of building trust don’t change. We trust someone who has integrity coupled with ability and benevolence. Those elements are as true today as when Aristotle first described them,” Colquitt said.
If the first temptation for a business leader in our current environment is to believe that the grievance crisis presents a fundamentally new challenge, then the other is closely related.
“Yes, the problem is large and the stakes are high,” Muir said, “but there’s a danger in responding to it by making grand commitments that we can’t follow through on. Even with large, seemingly intractable issues such as a lack of trust, making consistent yet small changes that focus on building trust can help move the needle.”
Colquitt tells a story to capture the everyday heroism of filling the trust bucket.
When his son was young and heard about his father’s main research areas — trust and justice — he seized upon the similarity with Superman, who pledges to “Fight for Truth and Justice.”
Growing up, he would periodically check in and ask, “Dad, are you still fighting for Truth and Justice?”
Colquitt would respond, “Yeah, buddy, I’m still fighting.”
Brett Beasley, Ph.D., is the Content Strategy Program Director for Notre Dame Research.
Illustrations by Adam McCauley.
ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE SURVEY
Procedural Justice
The following items refer to the procedures used to arrive at your (outcome). To what extent:
- Have you been able to express your views and feelings during those procedures?
- Have you had influence over the (outcome) arrived at by those procedures?
- Have those procedures been applied consistently?
- Have those procedures been free of bias?
- Have those procedures been based on accurate information?
- Have you been able to appeal the (outcome) arrived at by those procedures?
- Have those procedures upheld ethical and moral standards?
Distributive Justice
The following items refer to your (outcome). To what extent:
- Does your (outcome) reflect the effort you have put into your work?
- Is your (outcome) appropriate for the work you have completed?
- Does your (outcome) reflect what you have contributed to the organization?
- Is your (outcome) justified, given your performance?
Interpersonal Justice
The following items refer to (the authority figure who enacted the procedure). To what extent:
- Has (he/she) treated you in a polite manner?
- Has (he/she) treated you with dignity?
- Has (he/she) treated you with respect?
- Has (he/she) refrained from improper remarks or comments?
Informational Justice
The following items refer to (the authority figure who enacted the procedure). To what extent:
- Has (he/she) been candid in (his/her) communications with you?
- Has (he/she) explained the procedures thoroughly?
- Were (his/her) explanations regarding the procedures reasonable?
- Has (he/she) communicated details in a timely manner?
- Has (he/she) seemed to tailor (his/her) communications to individuals’ specific needs?
From “On the Dimensionality of Organizational Justice: A Construct Validation of a Measure” by
Jason A. Colquitt in the Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001.
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