Эссе по статье: 58. Jepsen, Denise M.; Rodwell, John J. ‘Justice in the workplace: the centrality of social versus judgmental predictors of performance varies by gender’, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Oct2009, Vol. 20 Issue 10, p2066

This study also showed probable reasons why previous pieces of research had contradictory results. As the gender aspect was not yet studied in this perspective the major part of its influence was overseen.
Managerial application of the study should deal with performance appraisal and differences of schemes designed for men and women respectively. What is more, informational justice’s importance shows that managers should share information more with their employees to guarantee higher level of commitment and satisfaction.
Basically, all four justice types are advised to be addresses by managers while designing appraisal package for employees. Outcomes should be distributed fairly, the sharing process should be of a high quality and the information should be communicated in a respectful and clear manner. Thus, all four types of justice would be addresses and all employees would feel that they are treated fairly by the managers.
However, the author mentions some limitations among which it is also said that outdoor and indoor employees showed somewhat different results and therefore application of the study may be biased in some cases. What is more, the very structure of the report being a self-report may limit validity of some results.
Critical assessment of the study
The research conducted in this article seems quite relevant for business environment of today. It seems that diversification has become a focal point for numerous small and big organizations all over the world. Wider involvement of women not only in working processes but also in management of big companies shows that they represent a huge driver of business. At the same time psychologists claim that women think and perceive the reality in a manner extremely different from that of men. Thus, it seems crucial for companies to keep this point in mind while designing work processes and compensation packages for employees. While work processes have already suffered numerous adjustments in previous decades, till today it has been common practice to think that women perceive justice at the workplace in the similar manner as men do.
The study in the article proved it wrong and provided quantifies results of how different women see things. Being less result-oriented and more relation-oriented than men women perceive other sides of justice. Sometimes the procedures designed to fit men do not fit women as well. However, informational justice appears to be as important for women as it is for men making it the universal justice for both genders at the workplace. Actually it is normal while a person cannot feel satisfaction and respect at the workplace if any crucial information is concealed from him or her and he or she is represented only with ready-made facts without any explication. This works well for compensation package. If a person is provided with a sum of money and with no explanation on the structure of the sum, this person may later hear that the colleague got sufficiently bigger sum. Such a situation would provoke disappointment and anger because people can only discuss the package among themselves without any hope to get a valid explanation on which factors the sum calculation was based.
The results seem to be trustworthy. It is known from the special literature on research conduction that the sample for an exploratory study has to be sufficiently big – 50 respondents or more. Here the sample is rather big thus statistical data are well grounded. Such a huge sample usually shows valid results in terms of statistics while the analysis eliminates some arbitrary deviations of the answers.
As for the main strong points of the study I would name the complex character of the analysis provided in the article. First, the author analyzed a huge amount of the literature and then pointed out several main theories that are applicable to the situation. Then he eliminated all the theories except the one that suited the most the research basis. What is more, the chosen theory seems to be the most multifaceted one and covers the topics that were under-covered by other models proposed earlier. The next strong point is a logical consequence of the previous one – analysis of both genders’ perception that is important for contemporary business.
As for the weak points, they were all named by the author in the Discussion parts. I would emphasize mainly how different were the backgrounds of the respondents. Regarding the fact that they represented industries as different as finance and libraries it may be thought that perception here depends also on the education level and social group to which respondents pertained. So probably further research conducted on two samples of people pertaining to different social and work classes would show similarities or differences and be the logical consequence of this study.
Topicality of the study and applicability for Russian business environment
It is well known that doing business in Russia differs from doing business in Europe or USA. There are some economic and governmental constraints. However, in regard of this study other type of constraints appears – social constraints. Russian society sometimes does not accept practices that seem obvious for Western organizations and companies have to re-think their methods.
Practically such a study may be conducted in Russian environment. However, the results would probably differ as Russians tend to have more collectivistic and feminine culture. These two dimensions of Hofstede cultural model presuppose that for Russians it is normal to have averaged salaries based on group performance and individual efforts in race for higher appraisal is evaluated as an “evil” , not a virtue as in Western societies. Feministic culture does not deal with dominance of women as it may seem from the first glance at the word but with dominance of social harmony orientation in a society. Russians tend to take care of close people, for instance, Russian parents take care of their children even when the children have already their adult children.
What does this mean for a four-factor justice model? Probably Russian employees disregarding the gender aspect would show higher results for procedural justice and therefore for social harmony orientation. At the same time even Russian men may probably show low scores in distributive justice perception as collectivistic nature of the nation has only started to change in direction of Western individualism. Russian companies are still very different from an average European group of people working together.
However, as for conducting the research it would be possible while there are no limitations for it at the moment. At the same time Russian business schools show growing interest towards Russian business realities as the country enters international market and attract a lot of attention.
What is more, such a research seems to be very interesting to conduct and hopefully business analysts (probably consulting agencies) will soon conduct it. Even now using Hofstede’s model and all five dimensions for Russia it may be seen how different the picture may be. It is also necessary to cover people of different backgrounds while people at executive positions would not be a representative sample of average “Russian working person”. It is also interesting to cover several regions and not only Moscow and Saint-Petersburg as the situation with individualism is even more specific in other regions.
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