It's So Hard To Be Fair Summary

BeThis assignment is asked to critique a given article “Why It’s So Hard to Be Fair” by Joel Brockner 2006. Before doing the critique let’s see when the feeling of being fairly treated or not has occur?
Fairness is needed where there is more than one person involving in a task. When a person is alone and carrying out a task individually all by him/herself for his/her own benefits, that person will not feel any unfairness. This means the feeling of being treated fairly or unfairly is the comparison act between the individuals.
In the given article, the author has mentioned several benefits by practicing process fairness such as better cost effective, improve performance of the organization, decrease potential risk of law suits, etc. So firstly let’s look at whether the practice of process fairness actually is that good and are there any limitation to process fairness.
So firstly let’s look at how the process fairness and job
performance related. The given articles mentioned that if the senior managers and middle managers practice process fairness the performance of the employees will most likely be increase or at least maintain and not to drop. In general, the above claim can be right. However, there are some scholars found out that there are only modest correlation between process fairness and job performance. Research from Colquitt et al. found that there were only (0.10 to 0.36) correlation between process fairness and job performance which means there were no strong correlation between job performance and process fairness (Colquitt et al, 2001). However, this does not mean that process fairness or fairness in the organization is not important. It is just that employees’ perceived to fairness may different by individually and partly depend on contingencies they face (Collins, Mossholder and Taylor, 2012).
Moreover, scholars have explained that process fairness does not only mean the interaction between managers and employees but also include organizational policies, rules and guidelines. Leventhal mentioned that procedures which applied consistently, reviewable, ethical and free from self-interest are perceived as fair (Leventhal, 1980) When we look at process fairness from social exchange point of view, individual will develop feeling of personal obligation and expect future contribution to be returned if they experienced acceptable reciprocation from others (Korsgaard et al., 2010). Therefore, this could enhance the job performance of employees in the future if they perceive process fairness as a tool to obtain desired resources and outcomes. Most of the scholars tend to agree with the author from the given article that if employees who perceived the organization are not fair may reduce their performance because they do not see reciprocation will occur (Matterson, Lewis, Goldman & Taylor, 2000).
Although the author from the giving article have mentioned all the benefits of process fairness. However, does the process fairness always work if the organization practices it effectively? I’m afraid the answer could be “No”. Brockner, Wiesenfeld and Diekman suggests that fairness does not always bring positive effects and sometime may even have negatives effects (Brockner, Wiesenfeld and Diekman, 2009). Desai, Sondak and Diekmann demonstrated a situations where process fairness will not have positive effects or even have negatives effects – they said risk adverse people will favor process fairness but the reaction from risk seeking people will be negative (Desai, Sondak and Diekmann, 2011). There was a studied conducted by Earley and Lind found that even though organization gave employees controls how tasks were assigned, there were no enhancement in their performance (Earley and Lind, 1987). Kanfer et al even give cautioned that organization should not assume that process fairness will always increase in performance (Kanfer et al. 1987).
There are also other things that organization needs to consider for the overall fairness.
Process fairness does not equal to the overall fairness which means organization may practice process fairness but employees may still think organization is unfair to them if they still think outcome/result is unfair to them even though the process to generate the outcome is fair. Machina, (1989) gave a good example on process fairness and outcome fairness with a mother and two children. Consider a mother has a candy for two of her children and she does not know who to give candy. So she decided to toss a coin to decide who to receive candy. Given that her daughter won the game and get the candy. However, her son still think that his mother is unfair to him because he did not receive candy. In this situation, her son does not care about how fair the process is but only care about the outcome. The similar situation could happen in the organization where employees may think they have been treated unfair because of the outcome of certain
decision.
In conclusion, even though there are positive and negative effects of process fairness, every organization should practice process fairness in up most objective manner. Fairness is something like a hygiene factors from Herzberg two factors theory. Most of the people take fairness as granted in the organization and therefore, when there is even slight unfairness in the organization, the reaction from the employees are strong and consequences are likely to be severe. Though the given article talked about process fairness, organization should take into consideration for other type of fairness such as outcome fairness. Sometime employees may feel that they are playing the losing game with the organization even though the game is fairly executed. Last but not least, if the organization want to have overall cost effective and performance improvement, they should emphasis on every aspects of the organization functions and take into consideration of their employees’ moral, behavior, personal objectives and motivate them accordingly together with the practice of process fairness. The organization culture of equal employment opportunities and diversity management will also enhance the practice of process fairness in the organization.