Justice at the Workplace: A Review

Special Section: Justice, Healthcare, and Wellness

This study was supported by the Academy of Finland (265977, 292824, 258598).

Introduction

Compared with many other disciplines, the research on organizational justice is relatively young. The "prehistoric" phase was dominated by classic theories of social psychology and motivational psychology, such as John Dollard and Neal Miller's frustration aggression hypothesis (1939),¹Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs (1943),²Fritz Heider's balance theory (1946, 1958),^3,4and Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance (1957).⁵The Theory of Relative Deprivation, developed by United States sociologist Samuel Stouffer after the Second World War (1949),⁶is usually considered the first real justice theory. It suggests that employees' satisfaction with rewards, such as salary or status, is not dependent on only their absolute level but also on how employees compare their rewards with those of others.

Another United States sociologist, George Homans, developed the theory of relative deprivation toward a more general theory of social exchange in his article "Social behavior as exchange," published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1958.⁷According to Homans, social interaction between human beings is a form of social exchange or a series of exchanges, by which different types of expectations and rules are developed in human communities. These expectations include, for example, reciprocity, understanding of modesty and equity, and the relationships between inputs and outputs. The stronger the formation of these rules in human communities, the more they become normative moral rules, even though they are often unofficial and unwritten. These social rules have been seen as prerequisites or basic characteristics of human communities. The more recent theories of social capital⁸are based on these concepts. Homans was also among the first theorists to consider humans as highly sensitive to inequalities in normative trade. Thus, people experience an imbalance between their input and the outputs they feel they deserve, as unfair. Homans was the first scholar to introduce the concept of distributive justice, and stated that perceived injustice leads people to try to restore balance. However, he did not specifically describe the means that people use to accomplish it.

The next author to further develop Homans's theory was Peter M. Blau, in his book Exchange and Power in Social Life (1964).