Perceptions of organizational unfairness

Organizational justice reflects employees’ perceptions of fairness in three important aspects of the employment relationship: how resources are distributed at work (distributive justice), how decisions about the distribution of those resources are made (procedural justice), and how employees are treated overall in this process (interpersonal justice) (Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005). The current way flexible working policies are designed, and very often implemented, may be at odds with these three important principles, leading to an overall perception of unfairness of the company.

To illustrate, consider the famous Harvard Business Review case, Mommy Track Backlash (Hayashi, 2001), frequently used in business school to discuss the breadth and fairness of flexible work options. The case begins with the following quote:

Everybody at ClarityBase seemed to understand when one account manager — a working mother — got a special deal: Fridays off, limited travel, easy clients. But when other employees — namely, nonparents — started asking for similar treatment, the company found itself on the brink of an organizational firestorm.

While it does not directly focus on high- vs. low-skilled employees, this case illustrates the disparity that often exists in the workplace regarding those who are entitled to flexible programmes because of their family situations. Indeed, there is wide consensus among researchers that, in many organizations, flexible working arrangements continue to be designed for employees with family caregiving responsibilities (Blair-Loy & Wharton, 2002) without taking into account the real needs and preferences of employees.

Moreover, since low-skilled employees often occupy temporary positions and work “bad” jobs, they often have very limited access to these policies (Muse & Pichler, 2011). Even when not explicitly excluded, low-skilled employees have de facto no entitlement to these programmes. For example, Muse and Pichler (2011) argued that the US Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), which gives employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off for medical conditions (including the birth of a new child), is almost impossible for low-skilled employees to obtain. On the one hand, this act has restrictive eligibility criteria that significantly reduce these employees’ potential access to this benefit. On the other hand, taking an unpaid leave of 12 weeks creates significant and often insurmountable financial constraints for low-skilled employees. Therefore, low-skilled employees receive less formal workplace support to meet their work and non-work responsibilities (Griggs et al., 2013).

The perception of unfairness concerns not only employees that have limited access to flexible programmes but also, in some cases, those who actually use them. While in the first case the perception of low fairness concerns the entitlement to flexible working options (i.e., distributive justice) and the procedures followed to grant access to some people and not others (i.e., procedural justice), in the second case the perception of injustice refers to the relations occurring between flexible employees and those with fixed schedules (i.e., interpersonal justice). For instance, prior research (i.e., Golden et al., 2008) has shown that telecommuters tend to experience lower workplace inclusion due to the lack of frequent physical interaction and the jealously of non-teleworking counterparts (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007).