How do Employees Respond to Workplace Injustice? New Insights from Ranked Ordinal Employee Preferences

Research suggests that employees who perceive distributive and interpersonal injustice at the workplace seek to restore equity and/or retaliate. While the literature in organizational psychology has focused on workplace deviance as a function of psychological traits and the individual management-employee relationship, the industrial relations and critical management literatures have focused on coordinated, mobilized worker actions. This article suggests that these two literatures need to be better integrated and that individual worker actions should not be considered in isolation; rather the full range of actions available to the employee should be taken into consideration. This, we argue, would allow for a more integrated understanding of the cognitive processes at work when the affected employee is faced with injustice at work. Using a unique sample of nearly 800 working Americans, this article examines responses to injustice in terms of preference rankings, using insights derived from a more fulsome reading of the decision sciences literature. We find that in response to high perceptions of distributive injustice, employees are most likely to “voice their grievances” directly to management. When this occurs in an employee-oriented workplace culture, managers can reduce the likelihood of covert responses such as production deviance. While voice is the dominant form of response, “exit” is the most likely outcome when employees face interpersonal injustice. Our findings add to the literature on deviance by showing that deviance is not the first preference of employees. Employees are less likely to choose deviance when faced with other attainable choices