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Employee reward is central to contemporary debates about work and employment relations; and in the context of ongoing wage stagnation, benefits represent a growing proportion of total reward value. Past studies have shown that when employees perceive benefits as unfair, this has a negative impact on engagement, performance and retention. Yet no previous studies have explored the components of a benefits system that influence employees’ fairness concerns. Using organisational justice as a theoretical lens, the purpose of this paper is to examine how dimensions of an employee benefits system influence the fairness perceptions of employees.

This paper reports on a qualitative, inductive case study of the benefits system in a large finance and insurance company, drawing on three data sources: interviews with the company’s benefits managers, organisational documents and open-text responses from a benefits survey.

Three dimensions of the benefits system strongly influenced fairness perceptions – constraints on accessing and utilising benefits; prosocial perceptions about the fairness of benefits to third parties; and the transparency of employee benefits.

The study informs organisations and benefits managers about the important role of supervisors in perceived benefits usability, and how benefits may be managed and communicated to enhance employee fairness perceptions.

This study makes a conceptual contribution to the benefits literature through a detailed exploration of the type of organisational justice judgements that employees make about benefits; and identifying for the first time prosocial fairness concerns about the impact of benefits on third parties.

The purpose of this research is to further understand salesperson distributive justice judgments by examining two controllable factors that may influence these perceptions: sales leadership (i.e. servant leadership) and salesforce control (i.e. quota).

The sample included 279 business-to-business salespeople from across the USA. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data.

Servant leadership and salesperson participation in quota setting both positively impact distributive justice perceptions (i.e. fairness in reward allocation), which subsequently affect salespeople’s commitment to providing superior customer value.

First study to empirically examine connections between servant leadership, distributive justice and commitment to customer value in the salesforce.

It is widely agreed that employees’ attitudes towards pay incentives are an important determinant of their effectiveness. The perceived fairness of pay incentives and their determinants are examined. Based on theories dealing with the fairness evaluation of rewards, a number of hypotheses are formulated proposing that employees’ judgements of the fairness of pay incentives will be partly determined by their attitudes towards work and certain situational and personal background factors. The findings generally support these hypotheses. They indicate that the fairness judgements of pay incentive schemes and the considerations underlying such judgements are determined, among other things, by work motivation and by personal background characteristics such as age, education, number of dependants, organisational tenure and country of origin.

Purpose – This chapter reviews the authors’ research on group procedural justice and group-serving behavior. It makes the case that fairness and unfairness can both motivate group-serving behavior; the former makes group members feel good about their identity, leading them to “reward” the group, and the latter indicates a group shortcoming, leading members to “repair” the group.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter describes several studies published elsewhere. Correlational research with employees and students examines the relationship between group procedural fairness and group members’ positive affect, which should translate into group-serving behavior. Experimental research with students investigates whether group procedural unfairness can result in group-serving behavior (measured via self-report and observed helping). Complementary findings from other authors are briefly described and discussed in support of a developed theoretical model of group procedural justice and group-serving behavior.

Findings – Group procedural fairness was more strongly related to arousing positive affect for strongly identified group members. Separately, strongly identified group members engaged in more group-serving behavior when their group had unfair rather than fair procedures.

Research limitations/implications – Possible boundary conditions for the motivating effects of unfairness are discussed (e.g., group permeability, time frame, and anonymity of unfairness). Suggestions for future research are proposed (e.g., examine the effect of justice information on group-serving behavior when group members can also modify group procedures).

Practical implications – Better understanding the effects of group procedural unfairness should influence how organizations and societies promote group-serving behavior.

Originality/value – Research on the motivating effects of both group procedural fairness and unfairness are synthesized into one theoretical model.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought uncertain working patterns in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world wherein unleashing power of knowledge became prototypical for real-time decision-making capacity of organizational workforce. Drawing from Vroom’s expectancy theory, this study aims to investigate whether shared leadership (SL) mediates the impact of perceived fairness of rewards (PFR) on knowledge capitalization (KC).

A survey of 484 employees in the Indian real estate industry was completed in two phases. Confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation model were applied for analysis and hypothesis testing.

PFR positively affected employee’s KC in Indian real estate industry. Also, SL partially mediated the effect of PFR on KC.

This study indicates the positive impact of PFR on employees’ KC and demonstrates position of SL for boosting its occurrence in organizations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the mediating role of SL between relationship of PFR and KC of employees.

After information systems (IS) implementation, many organizations report that system underutilization causes the failure to meet expected IS investment returns. It is imperative to understand the way to leverage employees’ fullest potential in the IS usage. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Anchoring on absorptive capacity (ACAP) theory, the authors develop an employee innovation model. Using survey data and structural equation modeling, this research investigates how perceived organizational levers affect innovation with IS usage (INVU) by introducing individual ACAP as a mediator.

The authors find general support for the research model through a survey of 205 employees using SAP business intelligence systems in China. The empirical data shows that three interrelated components of individual ACAP significantly contribute to INVU. The findings also suggest that, both fairness of reward and job autonomy are key organizational levers for the utility of individual ACAP. Furthermore, their effects on INVU can be fully mediated by individual ACAP.

The authors empirically unpack and validate individual ACAP in IS innovation situation. The findings provide academics and practitioners with an understanding of how management can inspire employees’ potential in implemented system innovation.

This chapter evaluates a model of the organizational context of burnout with direct reference to a new measure, the Areas of Worklife Scale (AWS). The model proposes a structured framework for considering six areas of worklife – workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values – that have resonated through the literature on burnout over the previous two decades. The chapter presents extensive data on the AWS, testing a model of the six areas’ interrelationships as well as their overall relationship to the three aspects of burnout. The results of these analyses are discussed in reference to the psychometric qualities of the measure and the implications of a structured approach to work environments for future development of research on burnout. Implications for developing workplace interventions are also considered.

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of organizational levers and information technology (IT) absorptive capacity on librarians' innovation.

This survey-analytic study investigated the librarians who were working in the libraries of the medical sciences universities in Iran. The data were collected using a researcher-made questionnaire distributed randomly among the members of the sample. The SEM and the LISREL software for data analysis were used.

It was found that the librarians' job autonomy and fairness of rewards had an effect on acquiring new knowledge and applying transformed knowledge. Although the results did not confirm the effect of the librarians' job autonomy on knowledge assimilation and transformation, they showed a direct and positive effect of fairness of rewards on knowledge assimilation and transformation. Furthermore, this study confirmed the effect of acquiring and applying new knowledge about the library IT on enhancing the librarians' innovation. The effect of knowledge assimilation and transformation, from the application of IT in libraries, on the librarians' innovation was not confirmed.

Learning about the effect of organizational levers on librarians' knowledge absorptive capacities, in terms of applying technologies, to create innovation is an important issue. This will elucidate the gaps of disregarding the effect of organizational levers and librarians' knowledge absorptive capacities on librarians' innovation, and will pave the way for better planning to achieve the libraries' innovative goals.

This is among the few articles that have helped to fill the existing theoretical and research gap in knowledge absorptive capacity in Library and Information Science (LIS). In addition, this article has made a valuable contribution to understanding the role of IT knowledge absorptive capacity as a mediator variable between the organizational levers and librarians' innovation.

Importer commitment is important to the improvement of exporter performance. More committed importers contribute more to the exporters’ performance than do less committed importers. The purpose of this paper is to examine one of the factors that motivate importers to be committed to their overseas exporters: exporter fairness. Specifically, this study examines the role of exporter fairness in developing importer commitment. Fairness is conceptualized as three dimensions: distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice.

The relationship between the three dimensions of exporter fairness and importer commitment is empirically examined using data collected from 120 Korean importers. Partial least squares technique was employed to test the hypotheses.

It was found that importers’ perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice contribute to increasing or decreasing importer commitment. Furthermore, when a sample of Korean importers was split into two groups, the three dimensions of justice were positively related to commitment for importers facing a highly volatile business environment, while only interactional justice significantly affected commitment for importers facing a low-volatile environment. These findings indicate that importers facing a highly volatile environment are much more sensitive to exporter fairness than are those facing a low-volatile environment.

The study demonstrates that importer commitment can be developed, particularly in highly volatile environments, if vulnerable importers are treated fairly by their more powerful exporters. Volatile environments offer more opportunity for overseas exporter opportunism than stable environments do, aking importers vulnerable to the opportunistic behaviors of overseas exporters. Such importers are likely to respond sensitively to exporter fairness in the form of increased or decreased importer commitment.

This study aims to investigate the negative impacts of innovative work behavior (IWB) on conflict with coworkers and turnover intention. It also aims to test the moderating effect of perceived distributive fairness on these relationships.

A total of 460 employees who were working in production and marketing teams at manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies in Indonesia were asked to complete the questionnaire. The final sample consisted of 135 sets of paired data of supervisor and subordinate. The multiple hierarchical regressions were used to test the developed hypotheses.

Findings of this study indicated that innovative work behavior had a positive and significant relationship with conflict with coworkers and turnover intention respectively. Moreover, the findings also found that perceived distributive fairness negatively moderated the relationship between IWB and both conflict with coworkers and turnover intention.

The study involved relatively a small sample selected from employees who were working in production and marketing teams in manufacturing and pharmaceutical companies in Indonesia. Future research should consider extending the sample to other industries and locations to test the arguments as well as exploring other contextual variables to buffer the negative impacts of IWB on conflict with coworkers and turnover intention

Scholars and practitioners alike agree that IWB helps organizations to gain and sustain competitive advantage. However, IWB may also create problems for organizations and employees that previous studies have left unexplored. This study examines such negative impacts, along with how to alleviate them.