The Role of Fairness Heuristic Theory in Justice Perception and Trust of Employees

Abstract

The purpose of this paper/ work is to develop a conceptual model that addresses the role of fairness heuristic theory in Justice Perception leading to Trust of Employees. Organizational justice research has focused on fairness nearly completely at one point in time. This perspective drastically hinders our understanding because fairness views might evolve continuously as people meet with new information. In order to capture the mechanisms through which perceptions of fairness evolve, we propose to develop a dynamic organizational justice model in which we look at workplace practices, employee engagement, and trust due to justice practices in an organization. The concept explains a cyclical process through which the cognitive treatment and judgements of an event are directed by their perceptions of the entity concerned. In turn, event judgements modify the structure of knowledge underlying perceptions of entities that have implications for change in perception. 

The Fairness heuristic theory (Lind, 2001) proposes that individuals care about fairness because it helps them deal with uncertainty. Organizational researchers know very little about what makes employees trust organizations (Searle et al., 2011). Employee perceptions of organizational trustworthiness buffer the relationship between managerial behaviour and trust. As a result of this interaction, organizational fairness is a stronger predictor of trust in organizations (Farndale et al., 2011; Thornhill and Saunders, 2003).