The real reasons why some bosses treat employees unfairly

One of our HR experts, Lynne, Bennington, looks at a recent investigationinto fairness in the workplace.

Employees treated unfairly at work might think their bosses are poorly trained, ill-suited for supervision, or just plain mean.

But an Academy of Management Journal article says many employees are treated unfairly for two reasons:

1. heavy workloads make managers too busy to be fair; and
2. companies expect, but do not reward, managers for being fair.

“We might think about managers and supervisors as unfair, or think about them as being mean bosses, or incompetent, etcetera. But we need to think about why the workplace environment can create these types of behaviours.

Instead of thinking, ‘This is a bad manager because his or her employees are unhappy,’ I would start thinking, ‘What are we asking him or her to do? How is the organization leading him or her to behave in those ways?’

This is a different way to look at issues related to effective management and supervision,” said Elad N. Sherf of New York University. Sherf wrote “Too Busy to Be Fair? The Effect of Workload and Rewards on Managers’ Justice Rule Adherence” with coauthors Vijaya Venkataramani of the University of Maryland and Ravi S. Gajendran of Florida International University.

Fairness is rarely discussed

The authors noted that few organizations explicitly mention treating employees fairly in job descriptions or reward managers for doing so in performance reviews, even though business leaders may know that employees who feel they are treated fairly:

• perform better;
• are more likely to help coworkers; and
• are less likely to steal or quit.

From an employee’s perspective, fairness from a manager includes four components, Sherf explained:

• Distributive fairness —“Did I get the outcome I think I deserved? Was it appropriate given my contribution?”
• Procedural fairness —“How was the decision made? Did I get an opportunity to give my opinion? Is this decision consistent with what has been done before, and with other people?”
• Informational fairness —“Did I get all the information that I needed in a timely manner?”
• Interpersonal fairness —“Were interactions polite and respectful, or were they curt and rude?”

But “listening to employees’ concerns, explaining decisions, and formulating decisions in a respectful manner can require significant investments of time and effort,” the authors wrote.

“When managers face high workloads (as they often do), something’s got to give, and fair treatment becomes the unfortunate casualty. … Employees often complain that managers are too busy to meet with them, listen to their concerns, or update them about decisions; similarly, managers often acknowledge that they behave insensitively towards employees or act less fairly because they are overloaded or lack time.”

It takes time to manage fairly

Two broad types of tasks vie for managers’ time and attention, according to the article:

• Technical tasks, which include “ensuring that work units produce desired products or services, making technical decisions (which product to develop, what market to expand), reporting to superiors, interacting with clients, and implementing new initiatives.”
• Relational tasks, which include “evaluating employee performance, allocating resources and rewards to employees, recognizing their achievements and contributions, consulting with employees about decisions that affect them, and providing employees with relevant information.”

Part of the problem is that “organizations implicitly and explicitly signal to managers that technical tasks are more important than acting fairly. As a result, on average, managers perceive technical tasks—as compared to [relational] tasks—as more important or central to their role … [and] when facing higher workloads, managers tend to prioritize technical tasks at the expense of acting fairly,” the authors wrote.

Based on the findings, organizations can promote fairness by:

1. Giving managers more autonomy and flexibility over their own schedules

This could help a manager, for example, who needs to spend time with employees on a certain day, but a required, hours-long weekly meeting gets in the way, Sherf said.

2. Giving managers a role in writing their job descriptions and incorporating fairness behaviours into performance evaluations and reward systems

“I was talking to an administrative assistant, and she has two people who report to her,” Sherf said.

“She needs to supervise them and help with their professional development, but none of this appears in her official job description. So, the organization is not taking into account that her job has another dimension. By recognizing this and putting this into a formal job description and evaluation, it sends a signal about the importance of these things and the need to deal with them. It also more accurately shows the amount of work being required of people. Otherwise, you’re just ignoring reality.”

“When Google started directly evaluating managers based on behaviours, such as explaining decisions and expressing interest in employees’ well-being, which align with informational and interpersonal [fairness] rules, busy managers who previously felt that such behaviours were frivolous started devoting more time and effort to them at the expense of other technical tasks,” according to the article.

Prioritsing fairness

The authors wrote that managers themselves can prioritise fairness by:

• Putting a twist on the “management by walking around” (MBWA) supervisory style, which is an unstructured way of randomly checking in on employees. Doing this intentionally and at scheduled times can help hard-wire fairness tasks into managers’ daily or weekly routines.
• Creating a “schedule that includes regular meetings with employees, frequent town halls, or team meetings where the focus is on explaining decisions.”

The authors based their findings on three studies:

1. Twice-daily email surveys over 10 workdays among 107 U.S.-based managers in health care, media, transportation, finance, retail, and education. Managers rated their workloads and how often they performed tasks related to fairness, such as:
   • Seeking input from employees before making decisions that affect them
   • Explaining the logic of decisions to employees
   • Ensuring job responsibilities or assignments were equitably distributed among employees
   • Making sure to treat employees with respect. The managers also rated how much their organizations rewarded fairness in a pre-survey.
2. A survey among 166 managers, each with two employees, in a variety of industries in India. Managers answered questions about workload and how their organizations rewarded fairness. Employees answered questions about how fairly employees in general were treated.
3. A one-hour experiment among 239 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory management class at a U.S. public university

“Our findings suggest that putting the onus for acting justly entirely on managers might, ironically, be unfair. In contrast, our findings suggest that the organizational context also plays an important role in enabling managers to act fairly,” the authors wrote.