تقاطع عدالت و رهبری: تست یک مدل تعدیل پاداش مشروط و عدالت بین فردی

Previous studies show the positive impact of contingent reward on satisfaction, but few have examined moderators of this effect. We theorized that interpersonal fairness – treating people with dignity and respect – moderates the contingent reward effect because it creates the situation in which followers can positively engage with contingent reward efforts from their leaders. We therefore examined how interpersonal fairness moderates the contingent reward effect, finding that the positive impact of contingent rewards is stronger as interpersonal fairness increases. The implication of the finding is that using contingent rewards may only be effective when implemented in a polite, respectful manner represented by interpersonal fairness.

Why some leaders are more effective than others is of perennial interest, and there is no more dominant leadership perspective, in both lay and academic circles for the past several decades, than transformational and transactional leadership (Avolio and Bass, 1994, Judge and Piccolo, 2004, Walumbwa and Hartnell, 2011 and Wang et al., 2011). While transformational leadership is often trumpeted in popular incarnations of the theory, Bass’s (1985) original theory and contemporary versions highlight the importance of both transformational leadership and contingent reward. Additionally, recent meta-analyses have shown that contingent reward has positive effects on a range of positive organizational outcomes (Podsakoff, Bommer, Podsakoff, & MacKenzie, 2006) and that contingent reward has a positive impact on individual performance beyond that of transformational leadership (Wang et al., 2011). The moderating conditions under which contingent reward is more or less effective, however, have not received research attention (Podsakoff et al., 2006). The present paper therefore takes a closer look at contingent reward by linking the manner in which contingent reward is used to the organizational justice literature, specifically looking at how contingent reward is moderated by interpersonal fairness. By doing so we bridge two related but separate theoretical traditions: leadership and organizational justice (fairness). Leadership Bass’s (1985) transformational leadership theory suggests two types of leadership behavior: transformational and transactional. Transformational leaders motivate followers by tapping into followers’ intrinsic motivation, described as the four I’s: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration. Transformational leadership has received a great deal of research attention, identifying relations to a number of positive outcomes, including job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, and work effort (Burke et al., 2007, Judge and Piccolo, 2004, Rowold and Heinitz, 2007 and Wang et al., 2011). Transactional leadership includes behaviors seen as ineffective – management by exception and laissez faire leadership – plus contingent reward, which is viewed as positive. Contingent reward refers to the degree to which leaders provide clear expectations of performance and then back these up with exchanges. Meta-analyses show that both transformational leadership and contingent reward are positively related to outcomes and contingent reward and transformational leadership are strongly correlated to one another across studies (Judge and Piccolo, 2004 and Wang et al., 2011), which corresponds with full range leadership theories that argue for both transactional and transformational techniques (Antonakis, Avolio, & Sivasubramaniam, 2003). Bass’s (1985) original proposition was that transformational behaviors build on a solid base of contingent reward leadership. However, a recent meta-analysis found that “contingent reward predicted follower-individual-task performance beyond transformational leadership” (Wang et al., 2011, p. 253). Podsakoff and colleagues’ (2006) meta-analysis of contingent reward found positive impact of contingent reward on satisfaction with jobs, supervisors, and commitment to the organization. Practitioners and theorists agree that providing goals and feedback is beneficial to employees and the organization. It seems reasonable that there are better and worse ways of using contingent rewards, yet previous research has done little to examine the moderators of contingent reward (Podsakoff et al., 2006). For example, providing guidance and goals and then reinforcing their achievement can be done in either interpersonally sensitive ways or demanding and interpersonally insensitive ways. The justice literature on interpersonal fairness addresses this issue, finding that people respond to being treated respectfully or disrespectfully (Bies and Shapiro, 1987, Donovan et al., 1998, Greenberg, 2006, Masterton et al., 2000 and Zapata-Phelan et al., 2009). The present study therefore focuses on the effects of contingent reward at varying levels of interpersonal fairness. Interpersonal fairness Interpersonal fairness refers the quality of interpersonal treatment including politeness, dignity, and respect (Bies and Moag, 1986 and Colquitt, 2001). Interpersonal fairness is important to how leaders use contingent reward, but these two issues are explored in the separate literatures of justice and leadership. The present study explores the theoretical intersection of justice and leadership to examine the joint influence of leadership and interpersonal fairness on followers. Leadership and fairness, especially interpersonal fairness, seem inextricably linked – having a “natural connection” according to Colquitt and Greenberg (2003) – but have only recently been compared. Both fairness and leadership focus on how people react to treatment from another party, and they have similar outcomes, including job satisfaction, commitment, and trust in the leader (Masterton et al., 2000 and van Knippenberg et al., 2007). One of the few empirical attempts to integrate fairness and transformational leadership theory found that interpersonal fairness was related to transformational leadership but not to transactional leadership (DeCremer, van Dijke, & Bos, 2007). Followers’ perceptions of interpersonal fairness were positively related to their perceptions of the leader’s transformational leadership ability, suggesting that leaders who treat people with dignity and respect are more inspirational and motivate people to contribute to the enterprise. In an extensive review of leadership and justice, van Knippenberg and colleagues (2007) found that there was a relationship between leader effectiveness and distributive, procedural, and interpersonal fairness. They painted a future, however, for an integration of leadership and fairness that moves beyond the direct “main effect” of fairness on leadership perceptions. For example, Podsakoff and colleagues (2006) have found that contingent reward is related to fairness directly, but previous studies have not considered the complex manner in which they work together. Van Knippenberg and colleagues (2007) conclude in their review that the dual fields of leadership and justice could benefit from a greater understanding of the inter-relationships between constructs beyond the simple direct effects of interpersonal fairness, contingent reward, and transformational leadership. They concluded that: “A more full-blown contribution to research in leadership requires research focusing on the link between fairness and other aspects of leadership – either focusing on fairness as an explanatory (mediating) mechanism or on leader fairness as interacting with other aspects of leadership” (van Knippenberg et al., 2007, p. 122). The present study answers this call by investigating how interpersonal fairness works in conjunction (interacts) with transformational and contingent reward leadership. Specifically, we investigate how interpersonal fairness moderates contingent reward on work satisfaction. This moderation is of practical significance because we can readily identify leaders who use contingent reward in more and less interpersonally sensitive ways. Less fair are those who are very specific about performance expectations but do not express those expectations in ways that demonstrate respect or the sense that the follower is valued. In contrast, the same contingent reward style of expectations can be expressed while simultaneously showing verbally and nonverbally that the follower is a valued and respected member of the team. Moderation Based on feelings of self worth, we expect that interpersonal fairness moderates the impact of contingent rewards. Under the positive conditions in which people have been treated with dignity and respect (interpersonally fairly), their sense of self-efficacy is high enough that providing guidance and goals and subsequent rewards is supported by their self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997, Bandura and Cervone, 1986 and Wright and Kacmar, 1995). In contrast, treating people in undermining or disrespectful ways reduces these feelings of self confidence or self worth (Duffy et al., 2012, Duffy et al., 2006, Tepper, 2007 and Tepper and Henle, 2011). Contingent reward has positive effects primarily by reducing role ambiguity (Podsakoff et al., 2006). People want to know how to contribute to the group’s or organization’s endeavors and therefore appreciate being offered the guidance, but positive outcomes require that followers have the requisite level of self-confidence to enact the goals. The goal setting literature demonstrates that people pursue goals when they feel self-efficacious (Fan et al., 2008, Phillips and Gully, 1997 and Tolli and Schmidt, 2008). Leaders who treat people with dignity and respect therefore support the required self-belief levels in individuals to gain a benefit from setting goals and then rewarding them. This is consistent with Wang and colleagues’ (2011) meta-analytic finding that contingent reward adds incrementally after transformational leadership to performance because the follower and leader have engaged in a value-based relationship that provides the grounding for contingent reward. On the negative side of this interaction lie leaders who do not treat people interpersonally fairly by being rude and disrespectful. In contrast to their high interpersonal treatment counterparts, these leaders at best do not support esteem, but at worst undermine followers’ self-confidence (Breaux et al., 2010 and Duffy et al., 2006). Followers are not likely to engage with leaders who undermine dignity by treating people rudely and disrespectfully. When followers do comply as required with such formal leaders, they are unlikely to pursue a substantial interpersonal relationship or to take great heed in what the leader says or does for two reasons. First, followers minimize exposure to disrespectful leaders because it is unpleasant. This alone hinders any positive effects of transactional leadership. Second, they have little interest in following through with leader requests because there is little or no personal contract to fulfill with the leader. Moreover, people are treated respectfully and politely reciprocate this affective and cognitive treatment. The theoretical reasoning surrounding the self concept of followers leads to an interaction between contingent reward and interpersonal fairness shown in Figure 1. Both interpersonal fairness and contingent reward are positively related to outcomes such as satisfaction. Therefore, even without a moderating impact, satisfaction is likely to be low when both interpersonal fairness and contingent reward are low and higher when they are both are high. However, our theoretical reasoning is that interpersonal fairness facilitates the positive outcomes of contingent reward in such a way that contingent reward positively influences satisfaction when people are treated with dignity and respect. People will not engage with leaders who do not provide the baseline of respect and, therefore, such leaders do not have the benefits of contingent reward at their disposal whether they use the techniques or not. In contrast, leaders who provide the baseline of dignity and respect to followers are likely to experience benefits from contingent reward if they use it. These arguments lead to the following hypothesis. Hypothesis 1. Interpersonal fairness moderates the positive effect of contingent reward such that contingent reward has a greater impact on satisfaction at higher levels of interpersonal fairness compared to lower levels of interpersonal fairness. Transformational leadership promotes a positive self-concept on its own and may not be moderated by interpersonal fairness. DeCremer and colleagues (2007) note that “(transformational) leaders must be interactionally fair because followers have an active role in considering and accepting their leader as charismatic” (p. 1802). Transformational leadership works by creating an emotional appeal based on followers’ values, which in itself promotes self esteem, and people engage with transformational leaders because they are inspired to follow. In contrast to contingent reward techniques, it would be difficult to imagine leaders using transformational techniques in a way that did not demonstrate that they respected their followers. Transformational leaders can only inspire, promote the ideal vision of the future, and provide individualized consideration when they are doing so as part of a positive relationship with a follower (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999). We therefore make no prediction about the interaction between interpersonal fairness and transformational leadership beyond a simple additive effect. In addition to hypothesis 1, which is the centerpiece of this study, we make three predictions based on previous theoretical and empirical work reported in meta-analyses noted above (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001, Colquitt et al., 2001, Judge and Piccolo, 2004, Podsakoff et al., 2006 and Wang et al., 2011). Hypothesis 2. Transformational leadership is positively related to job satisfaction. Hypothesis 3. Contingent reward is positively related to job satisfaction. Hypothesis 4. Interpersonal fairness is positively related to job satisfaction. This paper makes a number of contributions to the field. First, it integrates justice and leadership literatures by exploring how leader fairness and mainstream leadership behaviors interact (van Knippenberg et al., 2007). Second, it explicitly examines interpersonal fairness, which is more naturally related to leadership (van Knippenberg et al., 2007), compared to procedural and distributive fairness recently examined by others (DeCremer et al., 2007 and Erdogan and Bauer, 2010). Third, it investigates a moderator of contingent reward to determine how it can be used in more and less positive ways according to the respect granted followers.

The present study is the first, to our knowledge, to investigate the effects of interpersonal fairness and leadership. We believe that the present data contribute to the understanding of how contemporary leadership theory fits with contemporary social justice literature on interpersonal relations. All leaders probably know in their hearts that respectful relationships lie at the core of their leadership successes or failures. This study has provided a foundation for how treating people with dignity and respect connects with leading them in a pragmatic ways.