A critical review and some directions for future research.doc

Are organizational justice effects generalizable across cultures A critical review and some directions for future research To appear in Handbook of organizational justice Fundamental questions about fairness in the workplace edited by Jerald Greenberg and Jason A Colquitt I thank Jerry Greenberg for his insightful comments on an earlier draft This chapter is supported by a research grant provided by City University of Hong Kong Abstract A three stage model consisted of justice rules criteria and practices is used to organize the cross cultural literature on organizational justice Justice rules are abstract principles that guide justice decisions justice criteria are specifications for implementing justice rules and justice practices represent the concrete standards verbal and non verbal behaviors and social arrangements for operationalizng justice criteria A review of the cross cultural literature shows that there are substantial cultural variations in the salience of and preference for justice rules criteria and practices Individualism collectivism and power distance provide the conceptual basis for organizing and interpreting most of the cross cultural findings in organizational justice although some results call for the development of alternative cultural frameworks for their interpretations Common problems in cross cultural research in organizational justice implications of cross cultural research for theory development and directions for future research are discussed Introduction Justice has a long history in human civilizations Twenty five centuries ago Confucius warned us in the Analects of the dire consequences of distributive injustice the head of state or a noble family worries not about poverty but about uneven distribution For where there is even distribution there is no such thing as poverty translated by Lau 1992 p 161 About a century later Aristotle cautioned us in the Ethics as many modern managers would that how actions are to be performed and distributions made in order to be just to know that is a harder task than to know what one s health requires translated by Thomson 1976 p 197 The Bible alludes to a proportionality norm for distributive and retributive justice for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap Galatians 6 7 A cursory reading of classics from different corners of the world would testify to the centrality of justice concerns in social life The ubiquity of justice is often explained by a functionalist view which argues that for a social group to function properly justice rules need to be developed to guide and regulate the behaviors of its members To the extent that there are organized social activities justice principles can be identified regardless of the cultural contexts involved In a recent interpretation of this functionalist view Lind 1994 argued that people are confronted with a fundamental dilemma about how much to submit to a group and how much to maintain a self identity These two goals are typically mutually exclusive and a balance must be struck between them The most efficient solution to this dilemma is according to Lind 1994 to rely on principles of justice By specifying power limiting rules about how people should be treated how decisions should be made and how outcomes are to be allocated rules of justice limit the potential for exploitation and allow people to invest their identify and effort in the group with confidence that they will not be badly used by the group p 30 In short the functionalist view suggests that justice norms and principles should be identifiable in any human groups It is interesting to note that the English words justice and fairness may not be easily translated into some languages For instance Van den Bos and Lind 2002 noted that these two English terms correspond well to their Dutch counterparts but that the translation of these terms into French is problematic Kidder and Muller 1991 raised some doubt about the importance of justice in Japan because there is no exact word for justice in Japanese However with Van de Bos and Lind 2003 I argue that linguistic variations in the slant and twist associated with the notions of justice and fairness across cultures do not invalidate the universality of the justice concern Different linguistic populations just talk about justice and fairness in different ways A universal concern for justice however does not mean that all justice effects are necessarily generalizable across cultures The purpose of this chapter is to review the organizational justice literature and identify both culture general and culture specific justice effects Conclusions and implications for future research are discussed at the end The Three stage Model of Justice To provide a framework to organize cultural similarities and differences in justice processes Morris and Leung 2000 proposed a two stage model in which justice rules defined as abstract principles that guide a decision are distinguished from justice criteria which are specifications for the implementation of a justice rule Leung and Tong in press noted that the two stage model is pitched at an abstract level and does not address cross cultural differences in justice related actions and arrangements To address this inadequacy Leung and Tong proposed the addition of a final stage of concrete actions termed justice practices that operationalize the justice criteria A justice practice represents the concrete standards verbal and non verbal behaviors and social arrangements with which justice criteria are operationalized and implemented Another way to put it is that a justice practice represents how a justice criterion in a given situation is enacted The three stage framework of justice is shown schematically in Figure 1 Insert Figure 1 about here Distributive justice is used to illustrate how the three stage framework can illuminate cultural differences in organizational justice Although people emphasize a fair allocation regardless of their cultural backgrounds they may differ in their preference for allocation rules such as equity equality and need Even if similar justice rules are adopted different cultural groups may use different justice criteria to implement a given rule For instance many forms of input are legitimate in implementing the equity rule such as effort and contributions and the allocation outcomes may vary drastically as a function of how input is defined Finally even if a certain input is chosen as the criterion there are multiple ways to operationalize it Contributions for instance may be defined by quantity quality or both When people are confronted with a justice situation and have to decide on what is fair they will first appraise the social situation to identify the appropriate principles of justice In the second stage they will select the specific criteria associated with these principles In the final stage concrete actions standards and arrangements will be selected to implement the chosen criteria In this model culture affects the interpretation of the social situation and the selection of justice principles criteria and practices Cultural differences may occur in each of the three stages and any such differences may lead to differences in the outcomes and perceived fairness of a justice decision Before I delve into the cross cultural implications of this three stage model I first review briefly the widely accepted tripartite typology of organization justice Distributive justice refers to the fairness of an allocation procedural justice the fairness of decision making procedures and interactional justice the fairness of interpersonal treatment during the implementation of the procedures Recently Colquitt 2001 has proposed a more detailed taxonomy of procedural justice which involves the splitting of interactional justice into an interpersonal and an informational dimension Because most previous research is organized around the tripartite taxonomy I will employ this scheme in the chapter In the following the three stage model is used to review the cross cultural literature on organizational justice and to evaluate the extent to which justice effects are generalizable across cultures Justice Rules Distributive Rules Distributive justice dominated initial behavioral research on justice and earlier works focus on the proportionality rule or the equity rule Adams 1965 Many other allocation rules have been discussed subsequently two of which equality and need have received the most attention e g Deutsch 1975 In general equity is conducive to productivity equality to interpersonal harmony and need to individual well being e g Deutsch 1975 Leung James 1993 Although resources may be tangible or as intangible Foa Nader Wall 2001 showed that Japanese were more likely to co opt a third party authority figure to resolve a dispute whereas Germans were more likely to rely on objective standards or standard operating procedures Subsequent research on procedural preferences has included informal conflict resolution procedures which has yielded more or less similar results With a set of both formal and inform procedures Leung Au Fernendez Dols and Iwawaki 1992 found that collectivists Spanish and Japanese were more likely to prefer negotiation and compromises than were individualists Dutch and Canadians Ohbuchi and Takahashi 1994 reported that Japanese were likely to rely on avoidance and indirect methods suggesting ingratiation impression management and appeasing to handle a conflict whereas Americans tended to adopt direct methods persuasion bargaining and compromise Chung and Lee 1989 reported that Japanese and Koreans were less likely to employ confrontational modes in conflict resolution in the workplace than were Americans Graham Mintu and Rodgers 1994 found that across eight cultural groups collectivism was correlated with a negotiation style that is characterized by cooperativeness and willingness to attend to the other party s needs Some cross cultural studies are based on the dual concern model which posits five basic styles of conflict resolution Carnevale Pearson Sullivan Peterson Kameda 1997 has argued that animosity reduction is an important criterion for evaluating the fairness of conflict resolution procedures Indeed his research with Hong Kong Chinese and American students and adults showed that this criterion was employed by both cultural groups Ohbuchi Fukushima and Tedeschi 1999 reported that in resolving a dispute Japanese regarded a justice goal to restore fairness as less important and a relationship goal to maintain a positive relationship with the other party as more important than did Americans Along this line of logic Tinsley 1997 argued that the goals underlying the dual concern model for conflict management should include not only concerns for self and others but also concern for the collective In fact Ohbuchi Suzuki and Yoichiro 2001 found that for Japanese employees the attainment of group goals was related to perception of fairness but not the attainment of individual goals which showed a direct effect on outcome satisfaction without being mediated by justice perception Power distance has been found to moderate the effect of voice Tyler Lind Ouchi Brett Adair Lempeurer Shirev Tinsley Tyler Fields Pang Leung Morris Rahim et al 2001 It is possible that the coefficients are not statistically different across cultures and a simpler more coherent picture may emerge based on the assumption of cross cultural generality Second a related problem with the use of regression or causal analysis is that the size of a beta or path coefficient depends very much on what other variables are being considered together with the focal variables The size of a coefficient is likely to decrease if a larger number of independent variables are being considered In different cross cultural studies the number of independent variables being examined often varies making it hard to compare the effect sizes of justice variables across these studies Third cross cultural studies may employ very different populations ranging from undergraduates MBA students rank and file employees managers and academics and the context of the research is also diverse involving very different industries Before we conclude that some genuine cultural differences really exist we need to rule out the plausible effects of contextual variables a task that has rarely been attempted Fourth cultural differences may have been artificially created by differential reliabilities across cultural groups In a concept is measured more reliably in one cultural than another a cross cultural difference may emerge while there is no difference in the true scores This problem is common for research that employs an etic perspective in which standardized instruments are used in different cultural groups When measures developed in one culture typically the US are applied in other cultures typically non Western cultures their reliability may be compromised For instance Rahim et al 2001 reported that the alphas of their justice measures are higher for American than for Bangladesh respondents One solution to this problem is to develop emic instruments that are appropriate for the cultures studied e g Farh et al 1997 Fifth main effects whether they are based on cultural similarities or differences are typically robust across cultures and highly replicable Interaction effects however are hard to interpret and replicate For instance Fields et al 2000 examined whether procedural justice moderated the effects of distributive justice on several job outcomes in a sample of Hong Kong employees and reported some two way interactions that differed from those reported by earlier studies in the U S In a cross cultural study of American and Bangladesh employees Rahim et al 2001 reported some cultural differences in the interaction effects between different aspects of justice on organizational commitment and turnover intention However without replications it is uncertain whether these cultural differences are real or due to chance Before we begin to grapple with the underlying meaning of cultural differences in interaction effects we must be certain of their robustness Directions for Future research Globalization has awakened many social scientists to a multicultural world and we have accumulated considerable knowledge about culture and organizational justice in the past two decades Nonetheless our understanding is still in its infancy and in the following I highlight a few high yield areas for researchers to pursue in this decade Few would object to the conclusion that the cross cultural findings guided by individualism collectivism and power distance popularized by Hofstede 1980 are most robust coherent and interpretable However for the field to progress and remain vigorous we must venture beyond these two familiar guideposts There are other cultural dimensions in the literature such as the value dimensions identified by Schwartz 1994 dimensions of social axioms Bond et al 2003 Leung et al 2001 and leadership dimensions identified in the GLOBE Project House Hanges Javidan Dorfman Gupta 2003 Systematic research to explore how these other dimensions are related to justice phenomena and processes should be underway Current research on organizational justice is mostly concerned with the allocation of tangible resources McLean Parks et al 1999 examined tangible as well as intangible resources and their allocation as well their recovery among Americans and Singaporeans For both cultural groups the equality rule was more often used and the equity rule less often used when resources were recovered than when they were distributed Resource types also affected the use of distributive rules with the equity rule used more often for monetary and status resources and the need rule used more often for goods services and information A related issue to note is that retributive justice i e the allocation of penalty to wrong doers has not attracted much cross cultural research in an organizational context for a review of culture and retributive justice see Leung Morris 2001 Interesting cultural similarities and differences will definitely emerge when researchers embark on new enquiries into different types of resources the recovery of resources and the allocation of disincentives Finally returning to the challenge of Greenberg 2001 that cross cultural research should play a key role in theory advancement the potential for cross cultural organizational justice research to invigorate and innovate justice theories has been largely untapped Van de vijver and Leung 1997 pp 13 14 has argued that the chance of radical theoretical innovation by testing a well establish justice theory around the world is low To maximize the impact of cross cultural research on theory development an important strategy termed the decentered approach should be adopted which includes culture as a key element in the initial stage of theory development Hopefully future theoretical work in the justice area will routinely consider culture as a fundamental building block for maximal innovativeness and comprehensiveness References Adams J S 1965 Inequity in social exchange In L Berkowitz Ed Advances in experimental social psychology pp 267 299 New York Academic Press Aristole 1976 Ethics translated by J A K Thomson Middlesex England Penguin Books Au K Hui M K Leung K 2001 Who should be responsible Effects of voice and compensation on responsibility attribution perceived justice and post complaint behaviors across cultures International Journal of Conflict Management 12 350 364 Babad E Y Wallbott H G 1986 The effects of social factors on emotional reactions In K S Scherer H G Wallbott A B Summerfield Eds Experiencing emotion A cross cultural study pp 154 172 Cambridge England Cambridge University Press Bellah R N Madsen R Sullivan W M Swidler A Tipton S M 1985 Habits of the heart Individualism and commitment in Americ