Advances in Organizational Justice

SUMMARY As Figure 1.3 illustrates, several important theories of orga-nizational justice can be arrayed in a 2 x 2 matrix. We do not want to imply by this characterization, however, that all four cells in the matrix have received equal amounts of attention. Generally speaking, recent research in organizational justice has tended to emphasize Cell 1 (distribution and material benefits) and Cell 4 (process and socioemotional benefits). Some attention has been paid to Cell 3, but very little recent organizational justice research exists for Cell 2. If only Cells 1 and 4 are considered, then the foci of justice would be perfectly correlated with the type of benefit. In other words, distributive justice would be based on the fairness of the material goods, whereas procedural justice would be based on the fairness of the socioemotional goods. Within the organizational justice literature, we would argue that this type of confounded comparison has dominated discussions about distributive and procedural justice. Figure 1.3 also illustrates another limitation of the organizational justice literature. This is the one with which we opened this chapter: