The Mirage of Procedural Justice and the Primacy of Interactional Justice in Organizations
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The Mirage of Procedural Justice and the Primacy of Interactional Justice in Organizations Rasim Serdar Kurdoglu1 Received: 15 March 2018 / Accepted: 25 April 2019 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract This paper offers a novel situational approach to study organizational justice in which the proposed unit of analysis is managerial behavior manifested in argumentation rather than employee justice perceptions. The currently dominant theoretical framework in justice research, which is built on justice perceptions, neglects the unique features of organizational order and vulnerability of procedural justice perceptions. As the procedural justice concept belongs chiefly to a spontaneous market order under which the rule of law is made possible, it is inappropriate to transfer this concept to an organization in which the rule of authority is dominant. Therefore, except the limited legal domain in which managerial freedom is restrained by laws, procedural justice in organizations represents a mirage that can give rise to hypocritical managerial actions that can legitimate morally controversial outcomes via eristic tactics. In contrast, interactional justice is of great importance to organizations in that employees and organizations can ensure their rational economic exchanges without deception. However, current formulations of interactional justice often regard interactions as a palliative recipe designed to alleviate reactions to outcomes and not as a constituent of distributive justice. Perelman’s argumentation theory can offer a new conceptualization of interactional justice that addresses this gap. Keywords Argumentation theory · Organizational justice · Procedural justice · Interactional justice · Legitimacy · Hayek Hayek (1973, 1976, 1979), who appears to have received no attention from organizational justice researchers, conceptualize organizations in a unique way, which can have striking implications for organizational justice research. Hayek (1973) divided social orders into mainly two categories, spontaneously evolved market orders and deliberately designed orders of organizations. Hayek (1973, 1976) argued that spontaneously evolved market orders and organizations have different natures that bring about the following distinct justice implications: (1) While a spontaneously evolved market order involves individuals who act by their self-interests without any deliberate social coordination, an organization involves individuals who are subject to the directions of an authority who established the goals. (2) While the rules of just conduct in a spontaneous market order are composed of abstract negative procedural norms that only impose what people ought not to do, administrative * Rasim Serdar Kurdoglu [email protected] 1
Faculty of Business Administration, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
rules in an organization are composed of concrete positive instructions to command what its members ought to do. (3) While impersonal market mechanisms are responsible for distribution of reward
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