Recent research indicates that managers' enactment of justice towards
an employee is influenced by factors associated with their relationship
with that specific employee, as well as demographic characteristics such
as gender. It has also been established that individuals who witness or
hear about injustice— so-called "third parties"—react negatively in
much the same way as the victims of injustice, even if they are not
personally affected. This reaction may potentially depend on the scope
of their justice considerations. Despite these advances pointing to the
importance of relational dynamics in reactions to injustice, the influence
of the relationship quality within a group on perceptions of and
reactions to organizational justice has so far been largely ignored in the
literature.
Given that organizational justice perceptions and reactions occur within
social networks, and that triads are the smallest unit to examine how
group dynamics influence attitudes and behavior, we examine the
effects of relationship quality among a manager, a worker who has been
treated unfairly by the manager (i.e., the victim), and a coworker as a
third party on how third parties react to managerial unfairness. Drawing
on self-categorization theory and Simmel's theory of triads, we apply a
series of metric conjoint analyses, generating 1,120 observations nested
within 140 participants.
Our findings suggest that the quality of the relationships within the triad
has a significant influence, over and above dyadic relationships, on how
third parties react (help or talk to the victim, punish the manager, or do
nothing) to perceived injustice.
Our study advances understanding of third-party reactions to injustice,
extends the dominant focus of justice research on dyadic relationships
to include triads and considers relational dynamics in reactions to injustice. In doing so, we respond to calls to consider social context in
research on organizational justice