Chapter 2 Social emotions and justice: How the emotional fabric of groups determines justice enactment and reactions

Purpose – This chapter presents a social emotions-based analysis of justice dynamics, emphasizing the important influence of social emotions (e.g., envy, empathy, schadenfreude, and vicarious joy) on justice judgments and reactions. The chapter also identifies a dimension for organizing social emotions, based on the degree of congruence they reflect between self and other. Congruent social emotions align the individual experiencing the emotion with the individual who is the target of their emotion, thus leading individuals to reason about and perceive justice in ways that are aligned with the target. Conversely, incongruent social emotions create misalignment and lead to justice perceptions that are misaligned and oppositional with regard to the target.

Methodology/approach – The chapter is informed by research suggesting that justice judgments are subjective. We consider the perspective of each of the key parties to justice (i.e., decision makers, justice recipients, and third parties) to evaluate the effect of (in)congruent social emotions on justice.

Findings – The core argument advanced in the chapter is that the (in)congruence of parties’ social emotions shape whether people evaluate the outcomes, procedures, and treatment encountered by a target as being fair. Fairness judgments, in turn, shape parties’ actions and reactions.

Originality/value – The chapter is the first to offer a framework integrating research on organizational justice with research on social emotions, arguing that social emotions strike at the very foundation of justice dynamics in groups and teams. In addition, the congruence dimension described in the chapter offers a novel and potentially important way of thinking about social emotions.