4 Towards a “Fairer” Conception of Process Fairness: Why, When and How More may not Always be Better than Less

Abstract

Process fairness refers to people’s perceptions of how fairly they are treated in the course of interacting with another party. Conceptually distinct from outcome fairness, it subsumes procedural fairness, interpersonal fairness, and the like. As recipients of decisions, we generally want to be treated with more rather than with less process fairness. As agents of decisions, we often would rather plan and implement them with more rather than with less process fairness. Whereas the organizational justice literature generally extols the virtues of high process fairness, recent theory and research suggest that when it comes to process fairness, more is not always better than less. We discuss why, when, and how people’s general tendency to desire higher process fairness over lower process fairness may be attenuated, eliminated, or even reversed. Our analysis is organized by the notion that under some conditions, receiving or acting with high process fairness prevents people from satisfying some of their basic psychological motives, such as their needs to feel good about themselves or to maintain a sense of control. Future research directions also are considered.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Steve Blader, Art Brief, Adam Grant, Joshua Margolis, Andy Molinsky, Harris Sondak, Bill Swann, Kees Van den Bos, and Jim Walsh for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Notes

1. Throughout this chapter we have used the terms desire, value, prefer, and want interchangeably.

2. It is also worth asking whether third party observers of a social interaction associate high power with lower enactment of process fairness. The results of a recent experiment shed light on this question (Rothman, Wheeler‐Smith, & Wiesenfeld, 2009). The authors exposed observers to descriptions of a decision maker who either solicited employee involvement (exhibiting higher process fairness) or did not solicit employee involvement (demonstrating lower process fairness). They were then asked to indicate the level of power that they believed the decision maker possessed. The results showed that process fairness was indeed inversely related to third parties’ estimates of the decision maker’s power.