Treatment fairness and group norms in times of turmoil : Implications for employee well-beini

Abstract

Employee well-being is important for individual employees and for the organizations they work for. However, current difficult economic times cause employees to experience unfavorable conditions (e.g., uncertainty, unfair outcomes and low cohesive groups) and this thesis attempts to provide organizations with insight into how to manage employee well-being in these turbulent times. This thesis establishes that treatment fairness, consisting of procedural fairness (e.g., consistency, transparent decision-making and processes) and interactional fairness (e.g., respectful and honest treatment by superiors) and group norms such as group cohesiveness (informal networks) and absence tolerance (attitudes towards illegitimate reasons for absence) are related to employee well-being (absenteeism, health complaints, workaholism, turnover intention, and work engagement). In addition, specific conditions appear to influence how both treatment fairness and group norms are related to employee well-being. For instance, with regard to treatment fairness, this research indicates that, when employees experience personal uncertainty, this increases employees’ focus on whether or not they are being treated in a fair manner. Moreover, in a highly evaluative context where individuals strongly feel personally responsible for their unfavorable outcomes (internal attribution), the relationship between organizational fairness and employee well-being appears to be further impacted. That is, in such conditions, compared to low procedural fairness, high procedural fairness counter-intuitively is more negatively related to employee well-being. With regard to group norms, low cohesive groups appear to interact with the absence tolerance views of group members to ultimately influence (voluntary) absence rates. Results indicate that in low cohesive groups, high absence tolerance was related to the highest rates of absenteeism, whereas low absence tolerance was related to the lowest levels of absence.