Tell me who, and I’ll tell you how fair: A model of agent bias in justice reasoning

Cojuharenco, Irina, Marques, T. and Patient, D. (2017) Tell me who, and I’ll tell you how fair: A model of agent bias in justice reasoning Group and Organization Management, 42 (5). pp. 630-656.

Text Tell me who, and I’ll tell you how fair.docx - Accepted version Manuscript Download (122kB)

Abstract

A salient and under-researched aspect of un/fair treatment in organizations can be the source of justice, in terms of a specific justice agent. We propose a model of agent bias to describe how and when characteristics of the agent enacting justice are important to justice reasoning. The agent bias is defined as the effect on overall event justice perceptions of specific agent characteristics, over and above the effect via distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. For justice recipients to focus on agent characteristics rather than on the event being evaluated in terms of fairness is an unexplored bias in justice judgments. Agent warmth, competence, and past justice track record (entity justice) are identified as agent characteristics that influence justice judgments. Agent characteristics can influence overall event justice perceptions positively or negatively, depending on the ambiguity in terms of justice of the event and on its expectedness from a particular justice agent. Finally, we propose that agent bias is stronger when justice recipients use intuitive versus analytic information processing of event information. Our model of agent bias has important theoretical implications for theories of organizational justice and for other literatures, as well as important practical implications for organizations and managers.

Item Type:	Article
Divisions :	Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences > Surrey Business School
Authors :	Name Email ORCID Cojuharenco, Irina i.cojuharenco@surrey.ac.uk Marques, T. Patient, D.
Date :	7 September 2017
DOI :	10.1177/1059601117729607
Copyright Disclaimer :	© 2017 SAGE Publications. This is the authors accepted manuscript version of an article published in [insert citation] and which can be found in its published form at [insert DOI].
Uncontrolled Keywords :	Organizational justice; Trust; Social cognition; Decision making
Additional Information :	Organizational justice; Trust; Social cognition; Decision making
Depositing User :	Clive Harris
Date Deposited :	29 Aug 2017 12:53
Last Modified :	16 Jan 2019 18:55
URI:	http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/id/eprint/842034

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads