Being fair is costly for bosses

[nancylebov]

The abstract:

Bosses who are fair make their workers happier and their companies more productive, but in the end may be burning themselves out. The study found that the act of carefully monitoring the fairness of workplace decisions wears down supervisors mentally and emotionally. "Managers who are mentally fatigued are more prone to making mistakes and it is more difficult for them to control deviant or counterproductive impulses," the lead author said.

As is annoyingly common, there's no mention of the size of the effect, nor the variation in it.

The original article's abstract (the article itself is behind a paywall):

The justice literature has paid considerable attention to the beneficial effects of fair behaviors for recipients of such behaviors. It is possible, however, that exhibiting fair behaviors may come at a cost for actors. In this article, we integrate ego depletion theory with organizational justice research in order to examine the consequences of justice behaviors for actors. We used an experience-sampling method in a sample of managerial employees to examine the relations of performing procedural justice and interpersonal justice behaviors with subsequent changes in actors’ regulatory resources. Our results indicate that procedural justice behaviors are draining, whereas interpersonal justice behaviors are replenishing for actors. Depletion, in turn, adversely affected the performance of citizenship behavior, and depletion mediated relations of justice behavior with citizenship. Furthermore, 2 traits that impact self-regulatory skills—extraversion and neuroticism—moderated the replenishing effects of engaging in interpersonal justice behaviors. We conclude by discussing implications and avenues for future research.

It might mean that administering rules wears people out, but actually talking with people about their concerns and encouraging solutions doesn't wear them out, but I'm guessing. What do you think? Anyone know how to get past the paywall?

Original link thanks to andrewducker.

Comments

[green_knight]

People who work in backstabbing environments, or people who need to keep track which lie they told whom, or who to butter up in order to advance *also* get stressed and burnt out. And quite often, or so it seems to me, people who work in unfair organisations not only dole out nasty behaviour, they're at the (perceived?) receiving end of it - the promotion they did not get, the last minute workload or problem employee that gets dumped on them instead of on someone else.

I don't think that there's necessarily a causation involved in 'managers who try to be fair' and 'managers who burn out.