Why leaders should care about "informational fairness"?

What is the role of a manager in developing a fair work environment? It's important to understand how employees perceive the fairness of their leaders. Having a reputation for fairness will help your career, but it will also help you get the best performance from your reports.

Leaders have to make decisions that not everyone will agree with, but the more people know about why a decision was made, the less frustrated they'll be about it. In fact, employees who feel a sense of reasoning behind the decision are more likely to agree with it, or at least go along with it, even if they don't agree.

Bottom line is that it's human nature to want to understand the why. Beyond that, they want to feel like their input and feelings matter. If they don't feel that, they can become disengaged and unmotivated. For example, if you promote an employee, it's important to share why he or she was selected. Granted, you can't speak to all the ins and outs, but you can highlight some of the good work. Helping people understand why she was promoted eases the tension, and perhaps they'll be motivated to emulate her.

Information can also help leaders obtain buy-in for their strategic decisions. Again, people don't follow leaders blindly, so the more information provided about decisions the better. Organizations that stress informational fairness can expect to receive much more support from employees on big decisions, even if they're unfavorable. We all know that we can't always get what we want, but we sure want to know why things aren't going our way.

"You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time."

That's what i've learned by doing this course on linkedin Learning, very informative course. Thank you Catherine Mattice Zundel for sharing your knowledge.