PS392 Unit 9 Organizational Justice Paper Example

Two Tender Jobs, No Posting: A PS392 Unit 9 Organizational Justice Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS392: Attitudes and Motivation in the Workplace

Unit 9 Organizational Justice Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the recycling plant, the sorters and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

What Happened

When our Tucson plant announced optical sorters and a robotic arm for the container line, the company promised that two new equipment tender jobs would be created, paying two dollars an hour more than sorting. Fourteen sorters signed the sheet for tender training, nine of them from swing shift. In October, the equipment vendor offered early training slots for two people. The plant manager, short on time, picked two day shift sorters he knew well and told them on a Friday. There was no posting and no announcement. Swing shift found out on Monday from a photo of the two in vendor safety vests.

Within two weeks, four of the swing volunteers had stopped attending the voluntary Saturday cleanup shift, an older sorter filed a written complaint saying the choice was based on "who drinks coffee with the boss," and the swing huddle went silent. The supervision rating on swing in the October pulse survey fell from 3.2 to 2.5.

Four Kinds of Fairness

Colquitt et al. (2001) gathered 183 studies of fairness at work and tested a four-part model. Distributive justice is about the result: did the raise, the shift or the promotion go to the people whose contributions earned it? Procedural justice concerns the process used to decide those outcomes: whether it is consistent, unbiased, accurate, open to correction and gives people a voice. Interpersonal justice is about manners in the broad sense, whether the managers who carry a decision out treat the people affected as people who count. Informational justice is about the explanation: whether anyone told them, truthfully and soon enough, why it happened. The four were related to one another but distinct, and each added its own explanation of how people reacted.

Scored against those four, the tender decision failed on nearly every count. On distribution, two of the most experienced container line sorters, both on swing, were passed over for two sorters with less time on that line. On procedure, there was no posting, no criteria and no chance for anyone else to be considered. On information, nobody explained the decision at all; swing heard about it from a photo. Interpersonal treatment was not openly rude, but learning about a decision secondhand felt, as one sorter put it, "like we don't exist after three o'clock."

The plant manager thought he had made a staffing choice; the crew experienced a verdict on whose effort counted.

Why Process Matters So Much

Cohen-Charash and Spector (2001) reviewed the justice literature and found that the different kinds of fairness tied to different reactions. Fairness of the process was especially strongly linked to reactions directed at the organization and its leaders, such as commitment and trust, while fairness of the outcome was tied more closely to how people felt about the outcome itself. That pattern matches our case. The two sorters chosen may well be good tenders. The anger was about how they were chosen, and it was directed at the plant manager and the company, not at the two people in the photo.

Colquitt et al. (2013) revisited the field a decade later with nearly 500 samples and asked why fairness affects behavior. Much of the link from justice to performance and helping behavior ran through the quality of the relationship between employees and the organization: trust, commitment and a sense that the employer cares. Justice also worked through emotion, with unfair treatment stirring negative feelings that shaped what people did next.

The Saturday cleanup shift is a good example. It is voluntary, it pays straight time and it has always depended on goodwill. When the tender decision damaged trust, the goodwill was the first thing withdrawn.

What Could Not Be Undone

The vendor training had already begun, and pulling the two day sorters would have been unfair to them, since they had done nothing wrong. So the remedy had to focus on process, explanation and treatment going forward.

What We Did

The plant manager agreed to speak to swing shift directly. At the start of the next swing shift, he said he had made the choice too quickly to meet the vendor's date, that he should have posted it and that it was a mistake. He did not claim the choice had been based on merit when it had been based on convenience. Several sorters said afterward that the apology mattered more than they expected.

Then we fixed the process for the remaining roles. The vendor confirmed that a third and fourth tender would be needed after installation, so the plant posted those jobs on both shifts with written criteria: at least a year on the container line, a safety record with no serious violations and a passing score on a short mechanical aptitude exercise the vendor supplies. Ties go to the longer container line service. Any sorter who is passed over can ask for a meeting to hear why and what would help them qualify. Swing sorters may take the exercise during their own shift.

Finally, we addressed information more broadly. Decisions about schedules, overtime and new roles are now posted at the same time on both shifts, in English and Spanish, with a line explaining why.

The Two Day Shift Sorters

The two people chosen deserved attention too. One told me she felt she had to defend herself every time she walked past the swing crew. I asked the plant manager to say clearly, in his swing shift remarks, that the problem was his process and not their qualifications, and the two of them agreed to share what they learned in vendor training at a joint huddle. That helped turn them from symbols of favoritism into a source of information for the people competing for the next two jobs.

Results

Eleven sorters, seven of them from swing, applied for the two new tender postings. Both jobs went to swing sorters, one of them an experienced container sorter who had been passed over in October. The older sorter who filed the complaint said he still thought the first choice was wrong but that "this one was done right." The Saturday shift recovered its numbers within a month, and the November pulse survey put swing's supervision rating back at 3.1.

Limits

I cannot separate the effect of the apology from the effect of the posted process, and some recovery may simply be time passing. I also cannot know whether swing would have reacted as strongly if both of the first choices had been the most senior candidates. The research suggests that even then, the missing process and explanation would have hurt.

Conclusion

Filling the first two tender jobs without a posting damaged trust on swing shift. Colquitt and colleagues' four kinds of fairness showed how many ways the decision fell short, Cohen-Charash and Spector explained why the process drew more anger than the outcome, and the 2013 update showed how lost trust turns into lost goodwill. An apology, posted criteria, a way to ask why and decisions announced on both shifts at once began to repair the damage.

References

Cohen-Charash, Y., & Spector, P. E. (2001). The role of justice in organizations: A meta-analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86(2), 278-321. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.2001.2958

Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millennium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.3.425

Colquitt, J. A., Scott, B. A., Rodell, J. B., Long, D. M., Zapata, C. P., Conlon, D. E., & Wesson, M. J. (2013). Justice at the millennium, a decade later: A meta-analytic test of social exchange and affect-based perspectives. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), 199-236. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031757