When does procedural fairness promote organizational citizenship behavior? Integrating empowering leadership types in relational justice models
Van Dijke, M., De Cremer, D., Mayer, D. M., & van Quaquebeke, N. (2012). When does procedural fairness promote organizational citizenship behavior? Integrating empowering leadership types in relational justice models. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 117, 24-40.
Abstract:
We examined how procedural fairness interacts with empowering leadership to promote employee OCB. We focused on two core empowering leadership types—encouraging self-development and encouraging independent action. An experiment revealed that leaders encouraging self-development made employees desire status information more (i.e., information regarding one’s value to the organization). Conversely, leaders encouraging independent action decreased employees’ desire for this type of information. Subsequently, a multisource field study (with a US and German sample) showed that encouraging self-development strengthened the relationship between procedural fairness and employee OCB, and this relationship was mediated by employees’ self-perceived status. Conversely, encouraging independent action weakened the procedural fairness-OCB relationship, as mediated by self-perceived status. This research integrates empowering leadership styles into relational fairness theories, highlighting that multiple leader behaviors should be examined in concert and that empowering leadership can have unintended consequences.