Chapter 4: Justice, Relative Deprivation, and Blame: Disentangling Constructs to Understand Cognitive and Emotional Reactions to Greed

Greed is a central part of our popular discussions of business and banking, and yet scientific study of greed perceptions is in its infancy. In this chapter, we advance understanding of greed by reviewing and integrating three related sets of theories: Organizational justice, relative deprivation, and attributions. We develop a model that proposes that organizational injustice primarily drives perceptions of greed, whereas relative deprivation primarily drives affective reactions to greed. Attributions of responsibility moderate each of these relationships such that greed is only seen and felt when the greedy party is to blame. We discuss the implications of this model for research on greed, for organization-justice research in general, and for integrating organizational justice with other theories.