阶段转移事件对公平稳定性的影响

The Effect of Phase-Shifting Event on Fairness Stability

目前,组织公平的研究多集中于组织公平与组织结果变量之间关系,较少关注组织公平的稳定性。本文采取4(公平模式:公平控制/初始公平/不公平控制/初始不公平)×2(实验阶段:阶段1/阶段2)混合实验设计,探讨阶段转移事件对被试公平反应稳定性的影响。研究结果显示,公平对待导致积极的公平反应,不公平对待导致消极的公平反应;公平程序向不公平程序的转移导致对实验者信任和组织公民行为意向的评价显著降低;而不公平程序向公平程序的转移并没有导致对实验者信任和组织公民行为意向评价的显著增加,从而说明了公平反应的有限稳定性。

Previous studies have focused on the relationship between organizational fairness and organizational outcome variables, and most of which indicated that organizational justice has large effects on employee attitudes and behaviors. But few studies have explored the stability of fairness. According to the fairness heuristic theory, fairness judgment has two phases ： judgmental phase and application phase. In the judgmental phase, people quickly collect the fair or unfair information of leaders so that they arrive at general justice judgment. And in the application phase, people use this judgment to guide their decisions and behaviors. However, in reality, people often re-examine their fairness judgment to see whether it is reasonable or not. So they return to the judgment stage. Lind thinks there are two reasons for it ： signs on the relationship in question are changing, or fairness-relevant events or information fall far outside what would be expected from the existing general fairness judgment and push the perceiver from the application phase back to the judgmental phase. According to the fairness heuristic theory, the experience inconsistent with the fairness information will lead to a new heuristic, which would affect perceiver＇s perception and judgment. Thus, the shift from fair treatments to unfair treatments should cause negative reaction, and vice versa. This study used trust in the experimenter and the intentions of engaging in organizational citizenship behavior as the dependent variables to examine the effect of the changes of fairness perception on the fairness perceptual judgments of people. In the initial fairness condition, participants were treated fairly in the first trials and unfairly in the second trials. In the initial unfairness condition, participants were treated unfairly in the first trials and fairly in the second trials. Finally, participants in the fair control condition were treated fairly throughout the study, while participants in the unfair control condition were treated unfairly in all trials. The results showed that 1 ） fair treatments improve the positive reaction, unfair treatments lead to the negative reaction. 2） The shift from fair procedures to unfair procedures led to a significant decrease of trust in the experimenter and intentions of engaging in OCB in the initial fair condition, but the shift from unfair procedures to fair procedures did not lead to a significant increase of trust in the experimenter and OCB in the initial unfair condition. So, we can conclude that fairness judgment can be changed in some conditions. The findings are beneficial to understanding the importance of early perception of fairness, and have important practical implications to business managers.