Effect Of Own Versus Other’s Procedural Treatment On Judgment And Behavior:The Moderating Role Of Self-Construal

Although research on procedural justice(PJ) has showed convincingly that PJ has positive effects on people’s subjective and intuitive reactions like attitudes, emotions and behavioural responses, a noteworthy limitation is that most studies focused on recipients’ reactions to their own procedures, while ignoring how information about procedures that were accorded to others may contribute to fairness-based evaluations and behaviors. The past studies that do look at this issue provide contradictory results with respect to whether and how PJ of others affect fairness judgments and related behaviors. Based on previous studies, the present research aims to explore the effects of self and others’ PJ information on one’s procedure judgments(studyl), as well as exploring the moderating role of self-construal on the form of the self/other interaction(study2, study3).In study 1,172 students who participated voluntarily were randomly assigned to one of the conditions of the 2(procedure experienced self:voice vs. no voice) X 2 (procedure experienced by other:voice vs. no voice) between-group factorial design. Results from the scenario experiment showed the positive relationships between one’s own PJ treatment and fairness judgments are moderated by others’PJ treatments. What’s more, People are likely to react particularly positive when both self and others received fair procedural treatment.Based on study 1, study2 was a laboratory experiment which was designed to test the moderating effect of self-construal on the form of self PJ/other PJ interaction. With 175 students participated randomly to one of the conditions of the 2(procedure experienced self:accurate vs. inaccurate) X 2 (procedure experienced by other:accurate vs. inaccurate) X 2 (self-construal:independent vs. interdependent) between-group factorial design, study2 showed that among those in the independent self-construal condition, the "unfair-fair" combination of self PJ and other PJ was expected to lead to particularly low levels of procedure judgment; while those in the interdependent self-construal condition, the "fair-fair" combination of self PJ and other PJ was expected to lead to particularly high levels of procedure judgment.On the basis of the first two studies,we conducted a organizational field survey in study 3 with 236 employees. Study 3 aimed to examine the the moderating effect of self-construal on the form of self/other interaction on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). Results demonstrated the three-way interaction between own PJ, other PJ and self-construal was significant. Specifically, for participants with interdependent self-construal, the "fair-fair" combination of self PJ and other PJ was expected to lead to particularly high levels of OCB. For participants with independent self-construal, however the form of self PJ/other PJ interaction was identical with participants with interdependent self-construal, which did not support our prediction.