5 Common Causes of Organisational Injustice ... and How to Prevent It!

Hi everyone and welcome to Respectful Workplace Insights!

Today’s edition focuses on building fair and equitable workplaces … navigating a pathway to organisational justice.

Poor Organisational Justice is a Psychosocial Hazard in the Workplace.

Organisational justice refers to team members’ perceptions of fairness within a workplace culture.

It shapes trust, commitment, motivation, and performance.

The question becomes … where did injustice and unfairness begin?

As children, we learned to recognise and react to unfairness very early in life. ?

Over time our awareness of fairness and sense of justice has evolved.

5 Factors that Trigger Unfairness

1.?Unequal treatment - as children, when we saw someone else getting more or less than us for the same effort or behaviour, we began to develop an idea of fairness.

If a sibling received more praise or rewards for similar or less action, we may have felt something was ‘unfair.’

For me it was when my brother or sister got a bigger piece of cake!

2.?Comparison with Others - in social settings like school or playgroups, we compared what others received (praise, toys, or time) with what we received.

Noticing differences in treatment can trigger a reaction of “That’s not fair!”?

3.?Parents and Teachers’ Reactions - as children we learn from authority figures.

When parents or teachers emphasised when something was ‘fair’ or ‘unfair,” we may have adopted these concepts and started evaluating situations with those standards top of mind.

4. Moral and Empathy Development - as children we naturally develop empathy, which is closely linked to a sense of fairness.

When we see someone else being treated poorly, we may empathise with that person and label the treatment as unfair.

5. Rules and Games - play is often one of the first contexts where we as children experienced fairness in action.

Through games and rules, we learned that actions and outcomes should be consistent, and we react when others break these norms.

If a peer cheats in a game, children quickly recognise the injustice and may say “It's not fair.”

Our early understanding of fairness shapes how we assess situations in life.

It influences how we navigate fairness in the workplace and other social contexts.

Organisational injustice occurs when team members perceive a lack of fairness in processes, treatment, or outcomes.

5 Common Causes of Organisational Injustice

1. Biased Decision-Making - favouritism, discrimination, nepotism, a lack of impartiality or unequal treatment when decisions are made can lead team members to feel that their workplace is unfair.

Biases, whether explicit or implicit, can severely undermine fairness and evoke strong feelings of disrespect.

2. Lack of Transparency - when processes, criteria, or decisions are made behind closed doors, inconsistently applied, and promote exclusion, team members may perceive unfairness.

Transparency is critical to building trust, facilitating understanding and making decisions with integrity.

3. Inconsistent Application of Rules and Policies - if rules aren’t applied uniformly across the board, or they favour specific individuals, others may perceive organisational decisions as arbitrary or unfair.

Excluding affected people from consultation and decision-making processes breeds a sense of injustice.

This includes managers who believe the rules don’t apply to them and fail to follow policies, guidelines and procedures … all without accountability.

Inconsistent application of rules and policies creates a sense of inequality, favouritism and a climate of disrespect.

4. Poor Communication - ineffective communication, especially regarding decisions that affect team members, can foster a lack of informational justice.

Failing to communicate organisational direction, strategy, objectives and planning keeps people out of the loop.

Feeling left out of the loop regarding key information breeds frustration and distrust.

5. Lack of Respect and Recognition - when team member contributions go unrecognised, or they feel disrespected by supervisors and managers.

Failing to address inappropriate or harmful behaviour, poor performance and misconduct is disrespectful to other team members.

Discrimination, harassment and unequal treatment of team members deepens disrespect

The outcome is perceived unfair treatment, undermined morale and decreased loyalty.

?Addressing these common causes of organisational injustice is crucial to building a socially safe, high trust, and respectful environment of commitment, motivation and performance!

4 Examples of Organisational Justice

1.?Distributive Justice which relates to fairness in outcomes or resource distribution.

Example - when an organisation provides bonuses based on team member performance and contributions, rather than giving equal amounts regardless of effort, team members feel fairly rewarded.

It promotes a sense of distributive justice.

2.??Procedural Justice which relates to fairness in the processes used to determine outcomes.

Example - a promotion process that’s transparent and based on merit, where all team members have equal access to opportunities, and clear guidelines which foster procedural justice.

3. Interactional Justice which relates to fairness in interpersonal treatment, often divided further into interpersonal and informational justice.

Example (Interpersonal) - a manager respectfully addresses a team member’s concerns about workload, and listens without judgment, ensuring respectful communication and validating the team member’s feelings.

Example (Informational) - an organisation communicates openly about impending redundancies, explaining the reasons behind it and the decision making process. Team members feel that they’re being treated with transparency and respect.

4. Recognition and Feedback System - a system that regularly acknowledges team members’ hard work and contributions in a fair and consistent way.

Providing specific and timely feedback strengthens the perception of fairness across all types of justice.

The bottom line is simple…

Organisational justice is a shared sense of interpersonal or relational fairness within an organisation …

Treat all team members with respect, dignity and courtesy at all times

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!

If you’re up for building a connected culture steeped in organisational justice, I’m hosting my final virtual workshop this year to show you what you can do about it all!

You can save your free seat HERE

Thanks for reading this edition of Respectful Workplace Insights.

See you next week!

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2. Speak with me personally to map out a plan together.

Respectful Workplace Insights is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight?some of the things that get in the way of creating a respectful workplace culture. Eliminating disrespectful, unproductive and depleting conversations and behaviours that are getting in the way of building respectful relationships, ?alignment and performance is where we start. Each week I'll offer insights on how to do that so you can create a connected workplace culture where everyone feels safe and included.

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