Russell Cropanzano

University of Colorado Boulder | CUB · Leeds School of Business

In the last years, we have seen a rapid increase of alternative employment arrangements due to technological advances, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the changing expectations of workers. Alternative employment arrangements that include gig work, freelancing, side hustles, and microwork through digital platforms have become an integral part of the mode...

This paper reviews the individual and organizational implications of gig work using the emerging psychological contract between gig workers and employing organizations as a lens. We first examine extant definitions of gig work and provide a conceptually clear definition. We then outline why both organizations and individuals may prefer gig work, of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. As chief strategists of their respective firms, how do Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) react to mortality salience associated with the number of new daily COVID deaths in the U.S.? To answer this question, we integrate terror management theory (TMT) with regulatory focus t...

When subordinates have suffered an unfairness, managers sometimes try to compensate them by allocating something extra that belongs to the organization. These reactions, which we label as managerial Robin Hood behaviors , are undertaken without the consent of senior leadership. In four studies, we present and test a theory of managerial Robin Hoodi...

Crossover theory describes the transmission of stress/strains that are experienced by one person to another (Westman, Human Relations, 54, 2001, 717-752). In our article, we review the extant literature and present results from a meta-analysis-the first ever of this literature-to shed light on the magnitude of the crossover effect, the predictors a...

The ultimate goal of organizational justice research is to help create fairer workplaces. This goal may have been slowed by an inattention to the criteria that workers themselves use to ascertain what they believe is fair. Referred to as 'justice rules', these were originally determined by theoretical considerations and organized in four dimensions...

Over the past few decades, researchers have made notable strides in understanding the processes underlying workplace affect.* In particular, rigorous measures and new theoretical models for the study of workplace affect have been developed, validated, and updated with data gathered from employee samples across different industries, countries, and c...

In this chapter, we review the literature on leadership and emotion. Progress in understanding the junction of these two ideas has been steady but slow. To address this concern, at the conclusion of this chapter, we briefly discuss two theoretical obstacles that, in our view, have slowed progress. However, we begin with the larger substance of our...

In 2017, the Onassis Cultural Center in New York hosted an exhibition called “AWorld of Emotions” (Levere, 2017). This exhibition was publicized as “Bringing to vivid life the emotions of the people of ancient Greece, and prompting questions about how we express, control, and manipulate feelings in our own society” (Onassis USA, 2017). The historic...

In this review, we therefore invert the usual style of integration. We will discuss organizational justice through the lens of emotion research and not the other way around. We begin with a general overview of the workplace fairness literature, followed by a brief review of research on justice and affect during the last decade. We then expand this...

We investigated the relationship of emotional labor to perceived team support, extra-role behaviors, and turnover intentions. Our primary research question involved whether the relationships of individual deep acting with perceived team support and extra-role behaviors were conditional on the level of peer deep acting in the team. The possibilities...

Researchers have paid limited attention to what makes organizational authority figures decide to treat their employees either justly or unjustly. Drawing from the actor-focused model of justice, as well as the stereotype content model, we argue that employee conscientiousness and agreeableness can impact the extent to which supervisors adhere to no...

According to deontic justice theory, individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice. That is, standards of justice can be valued for their own sake, even apart from serving self-interested goals. While a growing body of evidence in business ethics supports the notion of deontic justice, skepticism remains. This hesit...

To date, most research on organizational justice has emphasized the evaluation of workplace events. These include a number of possibilities, such as the fairness of diversity strategies (Kulik & Li, 2015), conflict resolution tactics (Shapiro & Sherf, 2015), and selection systems (Truxillo, Bauer, & McCarthy, 2015), among others. While these events...

Research on organizational justice has increased in the last five decades with relevant implications for knowledge and practice. In the more than 50 years since the pioneering researcher John Stacey Adams (1965) published his seminal research facilitating the use and transfer of justice issues to the investigation and understanding of organizationa...

We propose that consideration of affective events theory can enrich our understanding of leader-member exchange (LMX) development. Drawing from previous research, we argue that high-quality LMX relationships progress through three stages: role taking, role making, and role routinization. Affective events theory indicates that emotions are relevant...

Social exchange theory is one of the most prominent conceptual perspectives in management, as well as related fields like sociology and social psychology. An important criticism of social exchange theory; however, is that it lacks sufficient theoretical precision, and thus has limited utility. Scholars who apply social exchange theory are able to e...

Affective events theory (AET) argues that everyday negative events are likely to lower both daily work engagement and momentary positive affect. These problems can then persist on subsequent days. However, AET also argues that individual strategies can diminish the ill effects of negative events. We explicitly focused on good sportsmanship or absta...

In this study we tested the validity of justice climate and peer justice, measured as second-order constructs, in a real work setting. First, we investigated the appropriateness of aggregating first-order facets of justice climate and peer justice to work-unit level of analysis. Second, we examined the construct validity of justice climate and peer...

In this chapter, we provide a detailed examination of the relationship between employee justice perceptions and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). Beginning with the earliest research on OCB, we articulate how these two topics within organizational sciences developed alongside one another as researchers attempted to articulate not only wh...

We draw on gender role theory to examine the relationships among employee-rated work–family conflict, supervisor perceptions of employee work–family conflict, employee gender and supervisor-rated job performance. We found that the relationship between employee-rated work–family conflict and supervisor perceptions of employee conflict varied based o...

Research on organizational justice explores the psychological mechanisms by which people render judgments of fairness, as well as their responses to these perceptions. When workers believe that they have been treated justly, they tend to show higher job performance, better work attitudes, and lower levels of stress. With these benefits in mind, thi...

This article reflects on context effects in the study of behavioral ethics and organizational justice. After a general overview, we review three key challenges confronting research in these two domains. First, we consider social scientific versus normative approaches to inquiry. The former aims for a scientific description, while the latter aims to...

Historically, organizational justice research has been studied at the individual level of analysis. While this perspective remains important, fairness can also be studied at the collective or unit level. In this chapter we review research on justice climate, defined as the extent to which work group members form shared judgments regarding how they...

This chapter provides an introduction to the Handbook of Justice in the Workplace. It begins with a brief review of the foundation of organizational justice and the organizational justice paradigm. Next, we provide an overview of the Handbook. We identify areas of growth and change in the organizational justice literature and describe the structure...

ForewordBy Tyler G. OkimotoCoordinating Editor. Correspondence: t.okimoto@business.uq.edu.au.In 2014, Riël Vermunt released his landmark book, The good, the bad, and the just: How modern men shape their world (Ashgate), an accomplishment that coincided with his receipt of the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 from the International Society for Jus...

This study proposes and tests a meso-level model of deep acting in work teams that draws on emotional contagion theory to explain how shared means of complying with display rules can arise in work teams. We argue that the presence of influential deep actors can lead to greater convergence (lower dispersion) on individual deep acting in the team. Th...

Organizational justice researchers tend to treat as synonyms the terms “justice” and “fairness”. We discuss different definitional arguments, concluding that these two concepts are distinct. Justice should be defined as adherence to rules of conduct, whereas fairness should be defined as individuals’ moral evaluations of this conduct.

We test a Justice-Quality model in which peer justice and justice climate are related to the service quality provided by the work unit. Based on the effort-reward imbalance model, we propose that units perceiving fair treatment provide better delivery of the core service (functional service quality) and better relational service beyond the core ser...

Justice rules are standards that serve as criteria for formulating fairness judgments. Though justice rules play a role in the organizational justice literature, they have seldom been the subject of analysis in their own right. To address this limitation, we first consider three meta-theoretical dualities that are highlighted by justice rules � the...

The present study examines the congruence of individuals’ minimum preferred amounts of voice with the prospect theory value function across nine countries. Accounting for previously ignored minimum preferred amounts of voice and actual voice amounts integral to testing the steepness of gain and loss functions explicated in prospect theory, we use c...

Research investigations into employee well-being (EWB) have tended to take a between-individual approach, which highlights differences among people. This traditional paradigm has been complemented by examinations of intraindividual EWB, which explores within-person variation over periods of time. Drawing on affective events theory (AET), we further...

We provide an empirical examination of peer justice climate, defined as team-level judgments of the fairness with which coworkers generally treat one another, and justice climate, defined as team-level judgments of the fairness with which the team is collectively treated by an authority figure. Based on previous theoretical work, we tested a hierar...

In this short response, we extend Lindebaum’s ethical analysis of organizational neuroscience. We do so in three ways. First, we examine the contemporary technical state of modern neuroscientific tools. Second, we consider the ethical implications of future investigations, including the possibility that neuroscience could enrich and otherwise impro...

Both organizational justice and behavioural ethics are concerned with questions of ‘right and wrong’ in the context of work organizations. Until recently they have developed largely independently of each other, choosing to focus on subtly different concerns, constructs and research questions. The last few years have, however, witnessed a significan...

This article assesses the links between non-professional employees' perceptions of reciprocity in their relationships with their supervisors and the positive and negative sides of employees' well-being at work: burnout and engagement. Two hypotheses were explored. First, the fairness hypothesis assumes a curvilinear relationship where balanced reci...

Social exchange theory is an old and venerable framework for understanding human social behavior. For decades this theory has been explored by anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists, as well as being extensively applied to management theory. This long tradition of social exchange–buttressed by the wide-ranging disciplinary perspect...

Taking a more empirical approach to theory development, in this chapter, Marie Mitchell, Russel Cropanzano, and David Quisenberry raise the question of what social exchange theory has contributed to organizational research. Scholars generally agree on the reciprocal nature of exchange patterns, but theories of social exchange differ in terms of the...

This Incubator introduces scholars to death awareness research. We explicate how mortality salience can be studied in conjunction with workplace behavior. Using the Terror Management Theory (TMT) framework, we explore morality salience in combination with several workplace phenomena, including aggression, discrimination, and punishment; and, severa...

We examined the impact of terrorism on the administration of organizational justice. Based on Terror Management Theory (TMT), it was hypothesized that punishment of deviance would change following an act of terrorism. Specifically, deviant individuals who committed an act high in moral severity would receive more extreme punishment after a terroris...

We articulate a teamwork process model of peer justice, defined as a shared perception regarding how individuals who work together within the same unit and who do not have formal authority over each other judge the fairness with which they treat one another. We argue that unit-level judgments of procedural and interpersonal fairness may influence t...

Previous research on emotional labor has typically been conducted at the individual level of analysis, despite the fact that many organizations have incorporated work teams into their business model. The use of work teams turns emotional management into a group task on which employees work as a collective. The present chapter proposes a conceptual...

Previous research pertaining to job performance and voluntary turnover has been guided by 2 distinct theoretical perspectives. First, the push-pull model proposes that there is a quadratic or curvilinear relationship existing between these 2 variables. Second, the unfolding model of turnover posits that turnover is a dynamic process and that a down...

This paper introduces the reader to Organizational Neuroscience, an emerging area of scholarly dialogue that explores the implications of brain science for workplace behavior. We begin by discussing how going inside the brain adds new levels of analysis that can advance and connect theories of organizational behavior. We then present three concrete...

We review and discuss an Organizational Neuroscience perspective on management science research. Reviewing recent findings in the brain sciences, we provide concrete examples of how an organizational neuroscience perspective can advance organizational behavior research. We conclude that this new paradigm offers powerful insights and tools that comp...

When I was serving as editor from 2006 to 2008, our team received literally hundreds of proposals and articles that were submitted for the small number of slots in our review issues. Sifting through these articles was a massive task, but it came with recompense. I was forced to think long and hard about successful and unsuccessful articles, and I l...

This paper presents and tests an integrative model of voluntary learning behavior. Drawing on social exchange theory, we argue that individuals are more likely to pursue learning activities when they identify with their employing organization and have a high quality leader–member exchange (LMX) relationship with their supervisor. We further argue t...

abstractThe present study reported a meta-analysis of the relationship between justice perceptions and affective organizational commitment, job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and trust in East Asia. Based on the tripartite model of self concept, we argued that the relationship between justice perceptions and outcome variables may be influenced...

Like many constructs within the managerial sciences, organizational justice has traditionally been conceptualized as an individual-level phenomenon. In recent years, this has begun to change, as a number of research studies have explored justice as a collective or group-level construct. The authors provide a review of this literature, historically...

Scholars studying organizational justice have been slow to incorporate insights from behavioral ethics research, despite the fi elds’ conceptual affi nities. We maintain that this stems from differences in the paradigmatic approaches taken by scholars in each area. First, justice research historically has assumed that individuals are motivated by a...

Consistent with the emerging positive agenda in organizations, the present research examines the role of psychological well-being (PWB) in predicting employee cardiovascular health. We tested this possibility in a sample of 113 supervisory level personnel employed by a medium-sized (500 employees) public sector organization in California. More spec...

The purpose of this article is to propose and test a model of extrarole customer service (ERCS). We propose that organizational justice (distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational) promotes well-being at work (low burnout and high engagement). Well-being at work, in turn, engenders more effective ERCS. Thus, well-being at work is co...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the causes, impact, and resolution of ideological conflicts in the workplace. By integrating research on organizational justice, the paper aims to argue that ideological discord is engendered though the interaction of distributive, procedural, and interactional (un)fairness. Design/methodology/appr...

Judgments of fairness take into account at least two pieces of information—the outcome received and the process by which the outcome was assigned. Generally speaking, low levels of fairness are apt to be reported when the outcome is unfavorable and the allocation process is deemed inappropriate. In this study, we investigate how regulatory focus th...

In this chapter we present an integrative and historical review of two literatures -- organizational justice and social exchange theory. We trace the history of social exchange from an emphasis on relationships to an emphasis on self-motivated exchanges, and back to an emphasis on relationships, and show how social exchange research evolved in the...

Organizational justice has the potential to create powerful benefits for organizations and employees alike. These include greater trust and commitment, improved job performance, more helpful citizenship behaviors, improved customer satisfaction, and diminished conflict. We demonstrate the management of organizational justice with some suggestions f...

For decades, since at least the famous Hawthorne studies, the happy/productive worker thesis has forcefully captured the imagination of management scholars and human resource professionals alike. According to this “Holy Grail” of management research, workers who are happy on the job will have higher job performance, and possibly higher job retentio...

This research provides further clarification to the age-old quest to better understand the happy/productive worker thesis. Using data from 109 managers employed by a large (over 5000 employees) customer services organization on the West Coast of the United States, both job satisfaction (r=.36, p<.01, 95% CI=.18 to .52) and psychological well-being...

This study tested a multidimensional model of organizational justice in the context of contingent employment. Based on previous conceptual and empirical research, the authors generated the following predictions. First, they predicted that the data would be consistent with a four-factor model of organizational justice, including distributive, proced...

It is well recognized that performance changes over time. However, the effect of these changes on overall assessments of performance is largely unknown. In a laboratory experiment, we examined the influence of salient Gestalt characteristics of a dynamic performance profile on supervisory ratings. We manipulated performance trend (flat, linear-impr...

In their chapter, Rupp, Bashshur, and Liao (this volume) have made an impressive contribution to the literature on multi-level justice. These authors have provided both a precise conceptual definition of justice climate and a measurement strategy (referent shift) that will greatly smooth the progress of future empirical inquiry. The goal of this co...