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J Bus Ethics (2013) 115:311325 DOI 10.1007/s10551-012-1400-9
Distributive Justice, Employment-at-Will and Just-Cause Dismissal
Mark Harcourt Maureen Hannay
Helen Lam
Received: 3 February 2012 / Accepted: 4 July 2012 / Published online: 14 July 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract Dismissal is a major issue for distributive justice at work, because it normally has a drastic impact on an employees livelihood, self-esteem and future career. This article examines distributive justice under the USs employment-at-will (EAW) system and New Zealands just-cause dismissal system, focusing on the three main categories of dismissal, namely misconduct, poor performance and redundancy. Under EAW, employees have limited protection from dismissal and remedies are restricted to just a few so-called exceptions. Comparatively, New Zealands just-cause system delivers much more just outcomes, both in terms of remedies and punishments. Despite a few shortcomings, it should be considered as a reasonable reference for policy changes in the US.
Keywords Dismissal Employment-at-will Just-cause
Distributive justice
Introduction
Organizational justice, or fairness, signicantly affects employees job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance (Greenberg 1988; Haar and Spell 2009; Tyler and Caine 1981). These, in turn, inuence workplace cooperation and effective functioning at the organizational level (Greenberg 1990; Masterson et al. 2000). Expectations of fairness, though rarely part of the explicit, written agreement, ordinarily comprise part of the implicit psychological contract between employees and their employers (Rousseau 1995).
Organizational justice has two key dimensions: procedural and distributive. Procedural justice is the perceived fairness of the processes and methods of management decision making, the way decisions are made, whereas distributive justice is the perceived fairness of distribution of outcomes resulting from management decisions (Cropanzano et al. 2007; Konovsky 2000), in particular the allocation of rewards and punishments. Naturally, the importance of fairness increases as a decisions potential impact on an employee increases. Dismissals have an especially major impact on employees, because the ensuing unemployment drastically reduces incomes and perceptions of self-worth (Leana and Feldman 1992). The distributive justice of dismissal decisions accordingly deserves much research attention.
In this article, we examine how different legal regimes inuence the potential level of distributive justice employees receive in dismissal situations. For comparative purposes, we chose to study the US and New Zealand, two countries very similar in many national characteristics but polar...