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Fairness in Virtual Teams: A Construct of E-Organizational Justice
Abstract
Using organizational justice as a conceptual framework, this chapter discusses the importance of fairness in managing virtual teams. It introduces a new construct, e-organizational justice, defined as employee perceptions of fairness in virtual work environments. The chapter also posits that fairness is essential to building and maintaining the cohesiveness and effectiveness of virtual teams. The chapter ends with a discussion on e-organizational justice's implications for further research and management practice.
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Current conceptualizations of procedural justice focus largely on the individual level of analysis; no framework exists for examining procedural justice's social context. Empirical tests reported here offer some support for group-level and cross-level hypotheses. Work group perceptions of cohesion and supervisor visibility in demonstrating procedural justice were associated with the development of procedural justice climate. Procedural justice climate was positively associated with helping behaviors after the effects of individual procedural justice perceptions were controlled for.
The adoption of telecommuting raises concerns for both managers and employees: Remote supervision presents monitoring challenges, while physical isolation may impede the employee's opportunity for, and involvement in, determining valued organizational outcomes (organizational justice). This study of 191 employees examined the relationships among telecommuting, organizational monitoring strategies, and organizational justice perceptions. Results suggest that monitoring strategies were more strongly associated with organizational justice perceptions than with telecommuting, and procedural and interactional justice perceptions related significantly to telecommuting. We provide implications, limitations, and ideas for future research.
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 tracing the growth of this research tradition, reviewing measurement issues, and discussing available research findings. The authors argue that there are at least two viable treatments of unit-level justice. Justice climate pertains to the manner in which a team is treated by outside agents, such as an authority figure. Intraunit justice climate pertains to the manner in which teammates treat one another. Although much more research is needed, evidence suggests that both justice climate and intraunit fairness are useful predictors of work attitudes and behavior.
Organizational identification, which reflects how individuals define the self with respect to their organization, may be called into question in the context of virtual work. Virtual work increases employees’ isolation and independence, threatening to fragment the organization. This study finds that virtual workers’ need for affiliation and the work-based social support they experience are countervailing forces associated with stronger organizational identification. Furthermore, perceived work-based social support moderates the relationship between virtual workers’ need for affiliation and their strength of organizational identification. Thus, when work-based social support is high, even workers with lower need for affiliation may strongly identify with the organization.
Virtual workplaces, in which employees operate remotely from each other and from
nianagers, are a reality, and will become even more common in the future. There are
sound business reasons for establishing virtual workplaces, but their advantages may be
offset by such factors as setup and maintenance costs, loss of cost efficiencies, cultural
clashes, isolation, and lack of trust. Virtual teams and telework are examples of such
arrangements, but they are not appropriate for all jobs, all employees, or all managers.
To be most effective in these environments, managers need to do two things well: Shift
from a focus on time to a focus on results: and recognize that virtual workplaces, instead
of needing fewer managers, require better supervisory skills among existing managers.
Taking these steps can lead to stunning improvements in productivity, profits, and
customer service.
Purpose
– This paper aims to extend knowledge about virtual teams and their advantages and disadvantages in a global business environment.
Design/methodology/approach
– Based on a literature review and reported findings from interviews with experts and practitioners in the field, the paper has identified and discussed the advantages and problems associated with creating and managing virtual teams.
Findings
– In today's competitive global economy, organizations capable of rapidly creating virtual teams of talented people can respond quickly to changing business environments. Capabilities of this type offer organizations a form of competitive advantage.
Originality/value
– By identifying the advantages and problems associated with virtual teams, organizations will be better able to successfully establish and manage such teams.
Virtual teams, whose members are geographically dispersed and cross-functional yet work on highly interdependent tasks, present unique leadership challenges. Based on our observations, interviews, and survey data, we identify six leadership practices of effective leaders of virtual teams. Specifically, we elaborate how leaders of successful virtual teams: 1) establish and maintain trust through the use of communication technology; 2) ensure that distributed diversity is understood and appreciated; 3) manage virtual work-life cycle (meetings); 4) monitor team progress using technology; 5) enhance visibility of virtual members within the team and outside in the organization; and 6) enable individual members of the virtual team to benefit from the team. These practices of virtual team leaders can be used to establish a foundation for training and developing future virtual team leaders.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents and consequences of the level of procedural justice climate in new product development (NPD) teams. The aim is to discover answers to the following questions: First, can the procedural justice climate level be used to predict NPD team outcomes such as product performance and product creativity? Second, what NPD team characteristics can be leveraged to improve the justice climate?
Design/methodology/approach
– A theoretical model was developed and tested on the survey data collected from 93 product managers of Turkish companies. The product managers who participated in this study represented various industries, including those of telecommunications, food, material, software, machinery, chemicals, and service technologies.
Findings
– Statistical analyses demonstrated that stability, collectivism, and moderate‐level functional diversity of teams were significantly related to the procedural justice climate. In addition, procedural justice climate had significant positive impacts on new product creativity and speed to market. Such impacts were found to be more significant with regard to high‐turbulence conditions.
Originality/value
– This paper is the first attempt to explore the role of procedural justice in NPD teams.
Using a multilevel framework, we hypothesized that both employee perceptions of procedural justice and a work unit level measure of procedural justice context would be associated with employee reports of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. 323 employees from 53 branches of a savings and loan corporation were used to test this hypothesis. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses revealed that procedural justice context explained variance in employee job satisfaction beyond that accounted for by individual perceptions of procedural justice. With regard to organizational commitment, this hypothesis was not supported. The results are discussed in connection with contextual aspects of procedural justice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Employees in global corporations are increasingly involved in ‘virtual teams’ on a regular basis. Conflicting definitions of virtuality make it hard to measure such things as how much virtual teaming occurs and how virtual teaming affects performance. As a consequence, it is hard to allocate funding and to design infrastructures and software to support this specific mode of working. Using the concept of discontinuities, or changes in expected conditions, we propose a virtuality index to assess how ‘virtual’ a given setting is. The discontinuities used include geography, time zone, organization, national culture, work practices, and technology. The index separately measures these aspects of virtuality and their effect on perceived team performance. Data collected at a large multinational corporation clustered into three overarching discontinuities: team distribution, workplace mobility, and variety of work practices. The study revealed that being distributed in and of itself had no impact on self-assessed team performance. Work practice predictability and sociability mitigated effects of working in discontinuous environments, while variety of practices (cultural and work process diversity) and employee mobility negatively impacted performance.
We investigated the previously unstudied relationship between procedural justice and identification within virtual teams,
with a particular focus on how two features of virtual teams, namely frequency of face-to-face meetings and geographical dispersion,
moderate that relationship. We argue that these two variables are sources of uncertainty, which in turn makes virtual team
members more sensitive to perceptions of procedural fairness as essential cues in the identification process. In this study,
we used cross-sectional survey methodology and data aggregated to the team level (N=39). As predicted, our results showed that the link between procedural justice and identification was stronger when there
were few face-to-face meetings and when teams were highly dispersed.
Two empirical studies are presented that explore how and why e-mail communication (versus face-to-face communication) influences cooperation in mixed motive group contexts. Results indicate
that, relative to those engaging in face-to-face interaction, those who interacted via e-mail were (1) less cooperative and
(2) felt more justified in being noncooperative. Feelings of justification mediated the relationship between communication
media and the decision to cooperate or not.
The increase in the use of self-managing work teams in organizations has been accompanied by growing employee resistance and concern about what such dramatic changes mean to workers. Using an organizational justice perspective, this chapter identifies and examines employee concerns about the move to self-managing work teams in two Fortune 500 organizations. Employee fairness concerns regarding three types of justice—distributive, procedural, and interactional—are highlighted. Findings suggest that to address employee fairness concerns regarding the move to self-managing work teams, managers should act distributively, procedurally, and interactionally justly.
A global virtual team is an example of a boundaryless network organization form where a temporary team is assembled on an as-needed basis for the duration of a task and staffed by members from different countries. In such teams, coordination is accomplished via trust and shared communication systems. The focus of the reported study was to explore the antecedents of trust in a global virtual-team setting. Seventyfive teams, consisting of four to six members residing in different countries, interacted and worked together for eight weeks. The two-week trust-building exercises did have a significant effect on the team members' perceptions of the other members' ability, integrity, and benevolence. In the early phases of teamwork, team trust was predicted strongest by perceptions of other team members' integrity, and weakest by perceptions of their benevolence. The effect of other members' perceived ability on trust decreased over time. The members' own propensity to trust had a significant, though unchanging, effect on trust. A qualitative analysis of six teams' electronic mail messages explored strategies that were used by the three highest trust teams, but were used infrequently or not at all by the three lowest trust teams. The strategies suggest the presence of "swift" trust. The paper advances a research model for explaining trust in global virtual teams.
Global virtual teams are internationally distributed groups of people with an organizational mandate to make or implement decisions with international components and implications. They are typically assigned tasks that are strategically important and highly complex. They rarely meet in person, conducting almost all of their interaction and decision making using communications technology. Although they play an increasingly important role in multinational organizations, little systematic is known about their dynamics or effectiveness. This study built a grounded theory of global virtual team processes and performance over time. We built a template based on Adaptive Structuration Theory (DeSanctis and Poole 1994) to guide our research, and we conducted a case study, observing three global virtual teams over a period of 21 months. Data were gathered using multiple methods, and qualitative methods were used to analyze them and generate a theory of global virtual team dynamics and effectiveness. First, we propose that effective global virtual team interaction comprises a series of communication incidents, each configured by aspects of the team's structural and process elements. Effective outcomes were associated with a fit among an interaction incident's form, decision process, and complexity. Second, effective global virtual teams sequence these incidents to generate a deep rhythm of regular face-to-face incidents interspersed with less intensive, shorter incidents using various media. These two insights are discussed with respect to other literature and are elaborated upon in several propositions. Implications for research and practice are also outlined.
As the nature of work in today's organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, virtual teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding virtual teams and, in particular, to identify implications for effective leadership. Specifically, we focus on delineating the dimensions of a typology to characterize different types of virtual teams. First, we distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams to identify where current knowledge applies and new research needs to be developed. Second, we distinguish among different types of virtual teams, considering the critical role of task complexity in determining the underlying characteristics of virtual teams and leadership challenges the different types entail. Propositions addressing leadership implications for the effective management of virtual teams are proposed and discussed.
This study explores the dimensionality of organizational justice and provides evidence of construct validity for a new justice measure. Items for this measure were generated by strictly following the seminal works in the justice literature. The measure was then validated in 2 separate studies. Study 1 occurred in a university setting, and Study 2 occurred in a field setting using employees in an automobile parts manufacturing company. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a 4-factor structure to the measure, with distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice as distinct dimensions. This solution fit the data significantly better than a 2- or 3-factor solution using larger interactional or procedural dimensions. Structural equation modeling also demonstrated predictive validity for the justice dimensions on important outcomes, including leader evaluation, rule compliance, commitment, and helping behavior.
This study examined the effects of team decision accuracy, team member decision influence, leader consideration behaviors, and justice perceptions on staff members' satisfaction with the leader and attachment to the team in hierarchical decision-making teams. The authors proposed that staff members' justice perceptions would mediate the relationship between (a) team decision accuracy, (b) the amount of influence a staff member has in the team leader's decision, and (c) the leader's consideration behaviors and staff attachment to the team and satisfaction with the leader. The results of an experiment involving 128 participants in a total of 64 teams, who made recommendations to a confederate acting as the team leader, generally support the proposed model.
The field of organizational justice continues to be marked by several important research questions, including the size of relationships among justice dimensions, the relative importance of different justice criteria, and the unique effects of justice dimensions on key outcomes. To address such questions, the authors conducted a meta-analytic review of 183 justice studies. The results suggest that although different justice dimensions are moderately to highly related, they contribute incremental variance explained in fairness perceptions. The results also illustrate the overall and unique relationships among distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice and several organizational outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction, organizational commitment, evaluation of authority, organizational citizenship behavior, withdrawal, performance). These findings are reviewed in terms of their implications for future research on organizational justice.
The process of exchange is almost continual in human interactions, and appears to have characteristics peculiar to itself, and to generate affect, motivation, and behavior that cannot be predicted unless exchange processes are understood. This chapter describes two major concepts relating to the perception of justice and injustice; the concept of relative deprivation and the complementary concept of relative gratification. All dissatisfaction and low morale are related to a person's suffering injustice in social exchanges. However, a significant portion of cases can be usefully explained by invoking injustice as an explanatory concept. In the theory of inequity, both the antecedents and consequences of perceived injustice have been stated in terms that permit quite specific predictions to be made about the behavior of persons entering social exchanges. Relative deprivation and distributive justice, as theoretical concepts, specify some of the conditions that arouse perceptions of injustice and complementarily, the conditions that lead men to feel that their relations with others are just. The need for much additional research notwithstanding, the theoretical analyses that have been made of injustice in social exchanges should result not only in a better general understanding of the phenomenon, but should lead to a degree of social control not previously possible. The experience of injustice need not be an accepted fact of life.
We propose a model of justice in teams that articulates the social influence processes through which shared perceptions of justice emerge and that explores the subsequent effects on team effectiveness outcomes. We also consider barriers to the emergence of shared team justice and introduce configural forms of justice that may result. Theoretical and practical contributions of the model for understanding the meaning and operation of justice at the team level of analysis are discussed.
The bulk of our understanding of teams is based on traditional teams in which all members are collocated and communicate face to face. However, geographically distributed teams, whose members are not collocated and must often communicate via technology, are growing in prevalence. Studies from the field are beginning to suggest that geographically distributed teams operate differently and experience different outcomes than traditional teams. For example, empirical studies suggest that distributed teams experience high levels of conflict. These empirical studies offer rich and valuable descriptions of this conflict, but they do not systematically identify the mechanisms by which conflict is engendered in distributed teams. In this paper, we develop a theory-based explanation of how geographical distribution provokes team-level conflict. We do so by considering the two characteristics that distinguish distributed teams from traditional ones: Namely, we examine how being distant from one's team members and relying on technology to mediate communication and collaborative work impacts team members. Our analysis identifies antecedents to conflict that are unique to distributed teams. We predict that conflict of all types (task, affective, and process) will be detrimental to the performance of distributed teams, a result that is contrary to much research on traditional teams. We also investigate conflict as a dynamic process to determine how teams might mitigate these negative impacts over time.
In this paper, we review the research on virtual teams in an effort to assess the state of the literature. We start with an examination of the definitions of virtual teams used and propose an integrative definition that suggests that all teams may be defined in terms of their extent of virtualness. Next, we review findings related to team inputs, processes, and outcomes, and identify areas of agreement and inconsistency in the literature on virtual teams. Based on this review, we suggest avenues for future research, including methodological and theoretical considerations that are important to advancing our understanding of virtual teams.
Advances in communications and information technology create new opportunities for organizations to build and manage virtual teams. Such teams are composed of employees with unique skills, located at a distance from each other, who must collaborate to accomplish important organizational tasks. Based on a comprehensive set of interviews with a subset of team members, team leaders, general managers, and executives on 65 virtual teams at Sabre, Inc.-an innovative organization in the travel industry-we identify five challenges that organizations can expect to encounter in establishing, maintaining, and supporting virtual teams, e.g., building trust, cohesion, and team identity, and overcoming isolation among virtual team members. Both leaders and members of virtual teams face particular difficulties in selecting team members who have the balance of technical and interpersonal skills and abilities required to work virtually and in evaluating the performance of individuals and teams working in virtual space. Examination of Sabre's strategies for coping with each challenge should be instructive to other organizations using or considering virtual teams.
The distribution of rewards and resources is a universal phenomenon that occurs in social systems of all sizes, from small groups to whole societies (Parsons, 1951; Parsons, Shils, & Olds, 1951). All groups, organizations, and societies deal with the question of allocating rewards, punishments, and resources. The manner in which a social system deals with these issues has great impact on its effectiveness and on the satisfaction of its members. For these reasons, it is not surprising that social scientists from many disciplines—political scientists, economists, sociologists, and psychologists—have been concerned with the problem of allocation (e.g., Jones & Kaufman, 1974; Leventhal, 1976a; Pondy, 1970).
The present article chronicles the history of the field of organizational justice, identifies current themes, and recommends new directions for the future. A historical overview of the field focuses on research and theory in the distributive justice tradition (e.g., equity theory) as well as the burgeoning topic of procedural justice. This forms the foundation for the discussion offive popular themes in contemporary organizational justice research: (a) attempts to distinguish procedural justice and distributive justice empirically, (b) the development of new conceptual advances, (c) consideration of the interpersonal determinants of procedural justice judgments, (d) new directions in tests of equity theory, and (e) applications of justice-based explanations to many different organizational phenomena. In closing, a plea is made for future work that improves procedural justice research methodologically (with respect to scope, setting, and scaling), and that attempts to integrate and unify disparate concepts in the distributive and procedural justice traditions.
This study examined how decision-making procedures can facilitate the positive attitudes necessary for cooperative relations in decision-making teams. We hypothesized that consideration of member input and members' influence on a decision affect their perceptions of procedural fairness and consequently, their commitment to the decision, attachment to the group, and trust in its leader. An experiment involving intact management teams supported these hypotheses and indicated that perceived fairness partially mediated the impact of procedures on commitment, attachment, and trust.
Managers are challenged to develop strategically flexible organizations in response to increasingly competitive marketplaces. Fortunately, a new generation of information and telecommunications technology provides the foundation for resilient new organizational forms that would have not been feasible only a decade ago. One of the most exciting of these new forms, the virtual team, will enable organizations to become more flexible by providing the impressive productivity of team-based designs in environments where teamwork would have once been impossible. Virtual teams, which are linked primarily through advanced computer and telecommunications technologies, provide a potent response to the challenges associated with today's downsized and lean organizations, and to the resulting geographical dispersion of essential employees. Virtual teams also address new workforce demographics, where the best employees may be located anywhere the world, and where workers demand increasing technological sophistication and personal flexibility. With virtual teams, organizations can build teams with optimum membership while retaining the advantages of flat organizational structure. Additionally, firms benefit from virtual teams through access to previously unavailable expertise, enhanced cross-functional interaction, and the use of systems that improve the quality of the virtual team's work.
Few topics have received more attention in the management literature of recent years than that of virtual organizations. Articles abound on the possibilities of virtual meetings, work teams, offices, factories, firms, and alliances. Given the burgeoning interest in this emerging phenomenon, it is surprising that very little empirical research exists on virtual organizations. Especially lacking are studies of communication processes within virtual organization settings. To help remedy this situation, this special issue provides an early window into several important communication processes that occur in virtual contexts. We are pleased to provide readers with a compendium of six articles that, collectively, advance current knowledge of communication processes for virtual organizations. Both single and multifirm studies are included here, with analyses covering such diverse topics as communication content, communication structure and effectiveness, tradeoffs in electronic and face-to-face relationships, and the use of communication in formation of organizational identity. All of the studies include rigorous analysis and careful measurement of communication, and all take place within naturally occurring organizational contexts, not laboratory settings.
An ethnographic study of a team of software developers working on a new product across two groups—located on the West Coast of the United States and in Bangalore, India—is used to analyze status dynamics in distributed groups. Whereas existing literature has emphasized the importance of communication, task design, and incentives for cooperation, this paper shows how status differentials and geographic distance reinforce each other to affect the work processes and
collaboration in distributed teams. The focus is on two elements: the relationship between the collaboration across the two groups and their members and the members’ interpretations of this relationship. Status influences the perceptions of the remote group, as well as the willingness to cooperate with its members. The key findings specify the informal closure strategies used by the high-status group in relation to the low-status group. Furthermore, the superimposition of geographic and status distance in remote work lowered the cost of exclusion of one group from the collaboration and led to the deepening of status differences between remote groups. By showing status to be both an input and an output of intergroup relations, the paper specifies some of the mechanisms through which status orderings are maintained and reinforced.
The phenomenon of managing work that is distributed over geographical distance is not new but is increasing in both frequency and intentionality as a function of globalization and knowledge-centric strategies. I review the literature on geographically distributed work, both that which highlights liabilities of loss of proximity and more recent research that emphasizes “virtual teams” as an intentional organizing device. I explore the adaptations, remedies, and countervailing strategies deployed to support such teams, contrasting those that minimize distance with those that increase individual and group capacity for coping with distance. I also emphasize that other dimensions of distance—cultural, administrative, and economic—affect the organization of work, the experiences of those doing the work, and individual and organizational outcomes. Here I highlight the “blended workforce” in which standard (traditional employees) and nonstandard (temporary and contract) workers are organized to accomplish interdependent tasks—and again contrast problems of distance with emergent adaptations. Finally, I explore the implications for human resource management (HRM), first considering which HR systems are best suited to work distributed over different types of distance, and then reviewing literature on specific HR practices—selection, training, task/job design, compensation, and performance appraisal. I close by arguing that HRM research must reach beyond its past focus on managing employees within a single firm over a prolonged career under collocated conditions. As the world generates countless new distance-related phenomena, our research must tackle the challenges of managing both standard and non-standard workers engaged in interdependent tasks of limited duration across multiple employers/clients and involving multiple dimensions of distance.
Two empirical studies investigated the context sensitivity of various rules for fostering organizational justice using hypothetical vignettes. Study 1 compared the importance of distributive justice rules (equity, equality, need) and procedural justice rules (process control, decision control, consistency, correctability, accuracy, bias suppression, ethicality) across individual and team contexts. The results showed that team contexts enhanced the importance of equality, consistency, and decision control. Study 2 compared the importance of procedural justice rules across different types of teams. The results showed that the accuracy rule was more important in small teams, while the consistency and bias suppression rules were more important in diverse teams. The importance of other rules, including interpersonal and informational justice, did not vary across the experimental conditions.
This study examined antecedents and consequences of procedural justice climate (Mossholder, Bennett, & Martin, 1998; Naumann & Bennett, 2000) in a sample of manufacturing teams. The results showed that climate level (i.e., the average procedural justice perception within the team) was significantly related to both team performance and team absenteeism. Moreover, the effects of climate level were moderated by climate strength, such that the relationships were more beneficial in stronger climates. In addition, team size and team collectivism were significant antecedents of climate level, and team size and team demographic diversity predicted climate strength.
The current trend with organizations is to streamline operations, cut cost, and operate with fewer employees (i.e., to do more with less). This trend has encouraged events such as downsizing and mergers as well as fostered the development of virtual work environments and new organizational forms like virtual organizations. Consequently, this change in organizational forms and the context of work has the potential to cause other associated consequences. One possible consequence is a change in the availability and type of referent others available. Likewise, a better understanding of worker referent choice remains a common issue of debate among researchers of comparison theories. This paper examines how referent selection relative to worker social comparison is (and will be) affected by the changing nature of organizations and the context of work.
Using theories of social comparison and influence as a lens through which to view the operation of justice in teams, this study explores the effects of interdependence and group identification on referent choice and justice climate strength. 372 undergraduate students participated in a laboratory experiment with two levels each of team interdependence, procedural treatment, and outcome favorability. The results showed that members of highly interdependent teams were more likely to make intergroup justice comparisons and that group identification partially mediated this relationship. Interdependence was also related to variability in team climate perceptions, with group identification as a mediator between interdependence and procedural justice climate strength. Overall, the findings highlight interdependence and social identity as contextual variables that influence the emergence of team-level justice perceptions.
Much of the interest and frustration connected with the virtual organization is fuelled by the same underlying cause: lack of clarity as to what exactly makes an organization “virtual”. Managers and commentators seem to use the term to describe two rather different phenomena. In both cases virtual implies that things are not quite what they seem, but in different respects. One concerns lack of physical proximity, the other concerns lack of ownership. Despite this difference, the two types of virtual organization are indeed linked in one important way: they both concern the innovative management of organizational boundaries.
We empirically examine the dynamic nature of trust and the differences between high- and low-performing virtual teams in the changing patterns in cognition- and affect-based trust over time (early, middle, and late stages of project). Using data from 36, four-person MBA student teams from six universities competing in a web-based business simulation game over an 8-week period, we found that both high- and low-performing teams started with similar levels of trust in both cognitive and affective dimensions. However, high-performing teams were better at developing and maintaining the trust level throughout the project life. Moreover, virtual teams relied more on a cognitive than an affective element of trust. These findings provide a preliminary step toward understanding the dynamic nature and relative importance of cognition- and affect-based trust over time.
This article reported the results of 2 studies that examined reactions to procedural justice in teams. Both studies predicted that individual members' reactions would be driven not just by their own procedural justice levels but also by the justice experienced by other team members. Study 1 examined intact student teams, whereas Study 2 occurred in a laboratory setting. The results showed that individual members' own justice interacted with others' justice, such that higher levels of role performance occurred when justice was consistent within the team. These effects were strongest in highly interdependent teams and weakest for members who were benevolent with respect to equity sensitivity.
Justice climates are considered to be an emergent phenomenon, which originates in the cognition, affect and behaviors of individuals, but is amplified by their interactions and manifests itself as a collective construct (see Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). However, researchers have given little attention to the role of social interaction in the convergence of member justice perceptions in teams. Using conversational data from 372 students working in a team business simulation with two levels each of procedural treatment and outcome favorability, this study examines how treatment fairness arouses sensemaking in teams and the features of such sensemaking processes that give rise to shared justice perceptions. The results highlight an interactive effect of outcomes and procedures on team sensemaking, which is shown to influence justice climate strength. The results also provide insight into the effects of discussion content, intensity and duration on the emergence of justice climates.