Gender Stereotypes and the Relational Consequences of Interpersonal Justice Violations

Abstract

A large body of organizational justice research has demonstrated that manager-subordinate relationships are damaged when managers violate justice rules. Yet, this relational damage may be unequal across managers. In the present research, we integrate research on organizational justice and gender stereotypes to examine how gender role prescriptions surrounding agency and communality may bias employee responses to interpersonal justice violations from female as compared to male managers. Across four studies using employee samples (total N = 1300), relational damage from interpersonal justice violations is exacerbated for female relative to male managers. Namely, employees were less trusting and committed to female managers who treat them disrespectfully during decision-making processes, but male managers did not suffer such relational damage (Studies 1 & 2). Moreover, moderated mediation analyses indicate that employees perceive interpersonal justice violations from female managers to be incongruent with low agency prescriptions for women, but not incongruent with high communality prescriptions (Studies 3 & 4). Taken together, our results reveal that female managers suffer more relational consequences for violating interpersonal justice rules than male managers because their behaviors are perceived as being excessively agentic. Our findings emphasize the importance of connecting organizational justice scholarship with the literature on gender stereotypes. More broadly, our research indicates that immaterial information about managers, such as their social category membership, can bias employee reactions to managers’ justice-related behaviors.