The tails of justice: A critical examination of the dimensionality of organizational justice constructs

Justice experiences are proposed to demonstrate a normal distribution with very fair and very unfair experiences being relatively rare and the majority of experiences in the middle of the distribution. Further, it is the extreme experiences of unfairness and fairness that are most important in shaping behavioral reactions to fairness. The reliance on traditional Likert-type measures to assess organizational justice constructs and use of linear correlation-based statistics has limited the opportunity to observe these effects. Two proposals for developing new measures that could enhance our understanding of the tails of justice distributions include: (a) develop a zone of tolerance model to assess violations and “more than fair” tails of the fairness distribution and (b) examine baseline levels of fairness and the influence of these baselines on reactions to specific justice events.