Chapter 9: Doing Justice to Organizational Justice:Forming and Applying Fairness Judgments

The chapters in this volume examine two themes. Five chapters (Folger; Ambrose & Kulik; van den Bos; Bobocel & Holmvall; Steiner) consider why and how individuals form justice judgments. The remaining chapters (Gilliland & Gilliland; Leung, Su, & Morris; Shapiro & Tinsley) concern how justice theories can be applied to diversity management. We integrate these contributions by combining the authors’ major ideas into an integrative model of the justice judgment process. We then apply this model to diversity management to examine the practical insights our framework offers. In so doing, we ask: Does the additional complexity inherent in the theoretical chapters improve our ability to apply organizational justice to organizational issues? Simply put, do the authors’ ideas “do justice to organizational justice?” After addressing this question, we close by offering suggestions for managing the complexity-applicability tradeoff in the literature.