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This special issue showcases papers by four sets of authors who share opinions about specific things that should be done for the field of organizational psychology to prosper. To begin, Lefkowitz argues that practitioners should embrace a more humanistic set of values. Second, Cascio suggests that the field's success requires integrating the contributions of scientists and practitioners. Third, Edwards identifies 10 key methodological limitations that must be overcome in organizational psychology research. Finally, Gelfand and her associates opine that to prosper, the field's theories and research must embrace a more global perspective. Concluding, Porter comments on what these papers suggest about the present status of the field and offers opinions on where the field appears to be—and should be—going. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Idiosyncratic employment arrangements (i-deals) stand to benefit the individual employee as well as his or her employer. However, unless certain conditions apply, coworkers may respond negatively to these arrangements. We distinguish functional i-deals from their dysfunctional counterparts and highlight evidence of i-deals in previous organizational research. We develop propositions specifying both how ideals are formed and how they impact workers and coworkers. Finally, we outline the implications i-deals have for research and for managing contemporary employment relationships.

Both laboratory and field experiments have limitations that likely account for the recent decline in their usage among organizational researchers. In this article, we introduce situated experiments as an experimental approach that optimizes the strengths of both laboratory and field experiments in organizational research while mitigating the weaknesses of each. We highlight four recently published studies using situated experiments. Drawing on these examples, we illustrate how the proper use of situated experiments can minimize threats to internal validity and ensure the ethical treatment of research participants.

Structured interviews with 996 recently fired or laid-off workers provided data for analyses of the situational and psychological antecedents of both thinking about filing a wrongful-termination claim and actually filing such a claim. Potential antecedents were drawn from relational theories of organizational justice, economic theories about claiming, and sociolegal studies of claiming in other contexts. Wrongful-termination claims were most strongly correlated with the way workers felt they had been treated at the time of termination and with their expected winnings from such a claim. Structural equation model analyses of panel data from follow-up interviews with 163 respondents four months later showed that the psychological variables were, in fact, causal antecedents rather than consequences of claiming thoughts and actions. These findings support relational models of organizational justice and lead to practical suggestions for managing the termination process so as to avoid wrongful-termination suits.

The present article analyzes role playing as an organizational research technique. A survey of organizational journals for 1978-1988 reveals that role playing was used in 11.55 percent of the published studies. Role playing studies are conducted to learn about attitudes and behaviors in organizational contexts and to learn about basic psychological contexts. The studies differ along three key dimensions: subjects’ level of involvement, the role being played, and the degree of response specificity provided. We recommend that role playing studies be designed in a manner that is appropriate to the purpose of the study, and offer guidelines for doing so.

The present article attempts to evaluate various tenets of moral philosophy by reviewing empirical data from the field of organizational justice bearing on: (a) people's concerns about fairness in organizations, and (b) the consequences of following or not following rules of justice. With respect to concerns about fairness in organizations, utilitarian claims that people believe that fairness requires distributions of reward based on merit were assessed. Similarly, evidence was reviewed bearing on the claim of psychological egoists that judgments of fairness reflect a self-interested bias. Finally, Kant's view that people should never lie was evaluated in light of evidence describing people's actual attitudes toward lying. In all three cases, the underlying philosophical premises were concluded to be overly simplistic in view of complexities about human nature revealed in empirical research. In addition, evidence was reviewed that shed light on the teleological claims of utilitarians regarding the purported benefits of following two common organizational practices — using merit-based pay, and punishing harmdoers. Here, too, the empirical evidence (findings that these techniques do not consistently yield the greatest good for the greatest number) suggests that the premise underlying utilitarian thought is based on unfounded, overly simplistic assumptions about the effects of following various allegedly moral ideas. It is concluded that our analyses provide a useful first step toward the desired goal of business ethicists of integrating prescriptive and descriptive approaches to justice.

The present article chronicles the history of the field of organizational justice, identifies current themes, and recommends new directions for the future. A historical overview of the field focuses on research and theory in the distributive justice tradition (e.g., equity theory) as well as the burgeoning topic of procedural justice. This forms the foundation for the discussion offive popular themes in contemporary organizational justice research: (a) attempts to distinguish procedural justice and distributive justice empirically, (b) the development of new conceptual advances, (c) consideration of the interpersonal determinants of procedural justice judgments, (d) new directions in tests of equity theory, and (e) applications of justice-based explanations to many different organizational phenomena. In closing, a plea is made for future work that improves procedural justice research methodologically (with respect to scope, setting, and scaling), and that attempts to integrate and unify disparate concepts in the distributive and procedural justice traditions.

A pay cut was theorized to create underpayment inequity among 114 salaried clerical workers. Relative to when their pay was subsequently reinstated, workers cognitively augmented the perceived impo...

C ertainly, it would appear that being fair is a central interest among today's managers, concerned as they must be about providing "equal employment opportunities," adhering to "fair labor practices," and offering "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." Just as judges promote fairness in the legal system, and referees and umpires ensure that sporting events are played fairly, managers are responsible for upholding both their company's and society's views of fairness by guaranteeing the fair treatment of employees.1 Despite this, however, it remains unclear what those responsible for the day-to-day management of organizations think constitutes fair behavior. Not surprisingly, just as legal scholars and philosophers cannot agree on what fairness really is in any absolute sense, social scientists have relied on studying justice as it is perceived to be that is, what is fair is in the eye of the beholder.2 In organizations, where the differing perspectives, interests, and goals of supervisors and subordinates might offer each access to different sources of information (as well as different biases on the same information), uncertainties about what is perceived to be fair are likely to arise.3 As a result, we may expect that seasoned managers trying to be fair may learn to focus on what others believe to be fair, thereby cultivating an impression of fairness rather than striving toward any abstract sense of morality. Indeed, when interviewing executives on the topic of organizational justice, I learned that in business organizations fairness was often a matter of impression-management. As one senior vice-president of a Fortune 500 firm confided in me, "What's fair is whatever the workers think is fair. My job is to convince them that what's good for the company is fair for them as individuals." Hearing this sentiment echoed by others, I began to suspect that fairness as viewed by corporate management was perhaps as much a matter of image as it was a matter of morality; that is, "looking fair" may be at least as important as actually "being fair." After all, even the best-intentioned, most "fair-minded" manager may fail to win the approval of subordinates who are not convinced of his or her fairness. Given this, we may ask the following two questions: (1) Are managers more concerned about looking fair or actually being fair? and (2) What do managers do to cultivate impressions of fairness? The Importance of Looking Fair: Survey Evidence

The article presents a response to the 1986 article “‘The Science of the Sophomore’ Revisited: From Conjecture to Empiricism,” by M. E. Gordon, L.A. Slade, and N. Schmitt regarding using college students as subjects for organizational research. The author states that though the subject of the original paper is valid, it deserves further analysis, and offers two reasons why journal editors should consider studies that feature college student data. The author suggests that editors consider the relative usefulness of student and non-student samples and the interpretation of the between-subject differences.

Subjects rated the perceived fairness of equitable and inequitable payments to either themselves or another while they were made either self-aware (by confronting their images in a mirror) or not self-aware. When not-self-aware, overpayment to oneself was perceived as being more fair than overpayment to a similar other, and underpayment to oneself was perceived as being more unfair than underpayment to a similar other. Among subjects who were made self-aware, however, the egocentric bias were not evidenced; subjects perceived all inequities as being equally unfair, regardless of whether these affected oneself or another. This evidence provides support for the heightened importance of internal standards offairness induced by the self-aware state.

A taxonomy is presented that categorizes theories of organizational justice with respect to two independent dimensions: a reactive-proactive dimension and a process-content dimension. Various theories within each of the four resulting categories are identified. The implications of the taxonomy are discussed with respect to clarifying theoretical interrelationships, tracking research trends, and identifying needed areas of research.