Justice

To treat people justly is to deal with them fairly and equitably. Leventhal (1980), following Adams (1965), distinguished between distributive and procedural justice.


Distributive justice refers to how rewards are distributed. People will feel that they have been treated justly in this respect if they believe that rewards have been distributed in accordance with their contributions, that they receive what was promised to them and that they get what they need.


Procedural justice refers to the ways in which managerial decisions are made and HR procedures are managed. People will feel that they have been treated justly if management’s decisions and procedures are fair, consistent, transparent, nondiscriminatory and properly consider the views and needs of employees.

Renewing trust 

As suggested by Herriot et al (1998), if trust is lost, a four-step programme is required for its renewal:

1. admission by top management that it has paid insufficient attention in the past to employees’ diverse needs; 

2. a limited process of contracting whereby a particular transition to a different way of working for a group of employees is done in a form that takes individual needs into account;

3. establishing ‘knowledge-based’ trust, which is based not on a specific transactional deal but on a developing perception of trustworthiness; 

4. achieving trust based on identification in which each party empathizes with each other’s needs and therefore takes them on board themselves (although this final state is seldom reached in practice).