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Fairly Meaningful: Mechanisms Linking Organizational Fairness to Perceived Meaningfulness

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Abstract

This research develops and tests a multiple-mediator model of the relationship between organizational fairness and employees’ perceived meaningfulness. Integrating (Rosso et al., Research in Organizational Behavior 30:91–127, 2010) theoretical framework on meaningfulness with theories on fairness, we examined four parallel mechanisms linking organizational fairness to perceived meaningfulness: organization-based self-esteem (OBSE), authenticity at work, moral identification, and organizational identification. We tested our model with three time-lagged studies. All of the studies found significant mediating effects of OBSE and authenticity at work, whereas the results of moral identification and organizational identification were mixed. Studies 2 and 3 also found that the combined mediating effect of the self-oriented mechanisms (OBSE and authenticity at work) was significantly stronger than that of the other-oriented mechanisms (moral identification and organizational identification). These findings suggest organizational fairness as a key antecedent of perceived meaningfulness and the prominent role of the self in the relationship between fairness and meaningfulness.

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Notes

  1. Rosso et al. (2010) differentiated meaning and meaningfulness in their review of the work meaningfulness literature: Meaning of work refers to what work signifies, whereas meaningfulness of work refers to the amount of subjective significance employees attach to their work. Meaning of work should lie theoretically upstream of meaningfulness of work. In light of this differentiation, Lips‑Wiersma et al.’s (2020) work related distributive fairness to multiple meanings of work (e.g., unity with others), but did not directly link fairness with meaningfulness or address whether certain meanings are more potent mechanisms linking fairness and meaningfulness, which we aim to answer in the current research. Our work also differs from Lips‑Wiersma et al.’s in our overarching theoretical framework and our focus on overall fairness instead of distributive fairness.

  2. Although the group engagement model (Tyler & Blader, 2003) and the group value model (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992) have a shared theoretical root that emphasizes the implications of fairness on people’s social self, their specific focuses differ (Tyler & Blader, 2003). The group value model highlights that fairness has “extremely powerful consequences for feelings of self-worth” (Tyler & Lind, 1992, p. 142), and therefore, we use it as the theoretical basis for the mediating effect of OBSE. The group engagement model stresses more that fairness plays “an important role in shaping identification with the group” (Tyler & Blader, 2003, p. 358), and therefore, we use it as the theoretical basis for the mediating effect of organizational identification. OBSE captures the evaluative aspect of employees’ social self, whereas organizational identification captures the descriptive aspect of employees’ social self. The effects of fairness on these two aspects of the social self are often treated as parallel processes (e.g., De Cremer & Tyler, 2005).

  3. We also analyzed our data using multilevel structural equation modeling. No significant relationships were observed at the group level, and the individual-level results were essentially identical to those using CR-SEs.

  4. We verified the participants’ employment status by asking them to report whether they were full-time employees in the survey.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Zijun Cai and Shuisheng Shi for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts of the article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 79th Annual Meeting of Academy of Management.

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This research was partially supported by the grant from Zhejiang Gongshang University awarded to the first author (IBS22KY015).

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  1. School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China

    Wei Si

  2. Department of Management, School of Business, Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Jialing Xiao & Leni Chen

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Si, W., Xiao, J. & Chen, L. Fairly Meaningful: Mechanisms Linking Organizational Fairness to Perceived Meaningfulness. J Bus Ethics 187, 53–72 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05271-2

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