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Organizational Justice, Ethics, and Corporate Social Responsibility these are all issues of ethics,
justice, and social responsibility are as fundamental to organizational behavior as they are to
society at large. As contracts are forged, individuals employed, and power differentials created,
opportunities for exploitation, oppression, and victimization emerge. In contrast, as social
structures evolve, coordinated opportunities arise for imparting positive social change at the
community, environmental, and societal level. Inherent to all of these phenomena is the
application of norms around moral behavior. Norms about what is considered fair and ethical
underlie how individuals perceive and evaluate the behaviors and decisions of others, how
groups and societies define acceptable behavior, and how individuals, groups and societies
evaluate the decisions and actions of organizations. In addition to defining the standards, these
norms also drive the reactions (or sanctions) against those who violate them. In developing the
theme for this special issue, we looked across the management domain for literatures touching on
the intersection of morality and organizational behavior. This search led us to three rich
literatures, which, while at times intersecting, have never been brought together or showcased
together in a systematic way. THREE SEEMINGLY DISPARATE LITERATURES
Justice, Ethics, and Social Responsibility 2 Justice Organizational justice deals with how
fairly employees feel or perceive various stakeholders treat them. . Studies on organizational
justice analyze perception formation, the cognitive and emotional processing of events,
attitudinal and behavioral reactions to perceived mistreatment, and the formation of justice
climates within workgroups and organizations (Rupp, 2011). We have accumulated a rich body
of literature with deep knowledge on this issue from the last 50 years of research in this area. We
know that justice and fairness matter to employees. Multiple meta-analytic investigations have
shown employee justice perceptions predict a wide array of organizational- and employee-
relevant attitudes behaviors (Colquitt, Scott, Rodell, Long, Zapata, Conlon, & Wesson, 2013;
Rupp, Shao, Jones, & Liao, 2014). When employees feel they have been treated fairly, they
respond with citizenship, heightened performance, and commitment, and show higher levels of
well-being. In contrast, when they perceive unfairness in the workplace, they show signs of
stress and withdrawal, and display more counterproductive work behaviors. Research has also
provided explanations for employees’ reactions to perceived justice or injustice. It seems that
perceptions of fairness are important to employees in assessing the fulfillment of a number of
universal needs (Cropanzano, Rupp, Mohler, & Schminke, 2001; Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel,
& Rupp, 2001). That is, employees care about fairness out of self-interest (i.e., to maximize their
outcomes and fulfill needs for control; Gillespie & Greenberg, 2005); they care about fairness
out of relational concerns (i.e., to solidify trust-based exchange relationships, especially with
those with authority over them, fulfilling their need for belongingness; Tyler & Lind, 1992); and
they care about fairness due to what seems to be an evolutionarily-based, universally-held moral
norm of justice (i.e., to fulfill needs for meaningful existence; Cropanzano, Goldman, & Folger,
2003; Folger, 1998). The last set of findings about
Justice, Ethics, and Social Responsibility 3 moral norms is particularly relevant to our
understanding of justice in the workplace in that it suggests that employees don’t only respond to
the fairness of their own treatment, but they can also have reactions to injustice targeted at
others, even when these other victims dissimilar or unconnected interpersonally to the observer-
employee (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986; Turillo, Folger, Lavelle, Umphress, & Gee,
2002). Finally, although employees may have the capacity to report on their general, overall
sense of workplace fairness (Ambrose & Schmike, 2009), as well as their general, overall
evaluation of particular facets of justice (e.g., distributive, procedural, interpersonal justice;
Colquitt, 2001), research is suggesting that justice perceptions reflect a complex aggregation of
events and judgments about individual parties (e.g., supervisors, clients, co-workers) that we are
just beginning to understand (Lavelle, Rupp, Manegold, & Thornton, in press). This special issue
offers a number of insights on how the normative rules influencing what is considered fair
treatment within organizations may vary across cultures. Guo and Miller (2015) explore how
employees in Chinese vs. Western contexts apply differential norms in assessing what is fair.
Whereas research has demonstrated universality regarding expectations of fair treatment across
cultures (Leung, 2005; Shao, Rupp, Skarlicki, & Jones, 2013), this paper is unique in that it
explores the relative importance of different justice dimensions across cultures. Although they
did find many justice dimensions to be common to both Chinese and Western contexts, two
emic (culture-specific) dimensions also emerged (propriety and respect in the West, and the
principle of ren in Chinese contexts). We also learn from this study that justice may be
