Chapter 7
Trust, Justice,
And Ethics
McGraw-Hill/Irwin
Copyright © 2009 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
Learning Goals
 What is trust? What are justice and ethics?
 In what three sources can trust be rooted?
What dimensions can be used to describe
how trustworthy an authority is?
 Employees judge the fairness of an
authority’s decision making along four
dimensions. What are those dimensions?
 What is the four-component model of
ethical decision making?
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Learning Goals, Cont’d
 How does trust affect job performance
and organizational commitment?
 What steps can organizations take to
become more trustworthy?
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Trust, Justice, and Ethics
 Trust
Person-based
Organization-based
 Justice
 Ethics
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Table 7-1
“America’s Most Admired
Companies”
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Discussion Questions
 Why are some authorities more trusted
than others?
 Would you be willing to let that person
have significant influence over your
professional or educational future?
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Trust
 Disposition-based trust
 Cognition-based trust
 Affect-based trust
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Disposition-Based Trust
 Has less to do with the authority and more
to do with the trustor.
Some trustors are high in trust propensity.
Trust propensity levels are actually relatively
high in the United States, especially in relation
to countries in Europe and South America.
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Figure 7-2
Trust Propensities by Nation
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Cognition-Based Trust
 Our trust begins to be based on cognitions
we‘ve developed about the authority, as
opposed to our own personality or
disposition.
Trustworthiness
Driven by the authority’s “track record.”
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The Track Record
 Competence
 Character
 Benevolence
 OB on Screen
Pirates of the Caribbean
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Affect-Based Trust
 Often more emotional than rational.
 Affect-based trust acts as a leap of faith in the
face of uncertainty about trustworthiness.
 Affect-based trust sometimes acts as a
supplement to the types of trust discussed
previously.
 An emotional bond develops, and our feelings
for the trustee further increase our willingness to
accept vulnerability.
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Figure 7-3
Types of Trust Over Time
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Figure 7-1
Factors
that
Influence
Trust
Levels
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Justice
 Distributive justice
 Employees gauge distributive justice by asking
whether decision outcomes, such as pay, rewards,
evaluations, promotions, and work assignments, are
allocated using proper norms.
 Procedural justice
 Fostered when authorities adhere to rules of fair
process.
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Procedural Justice Rules
 Voice
 Correctability
 Consistency, bias suppression,
representativeness, and accuracy
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Procedural Justice
Does procedural justice really matter—don’t
people just care about the outcomes that
they receive?
 Distributive justice and procedural justice
combine to influence employee reactions.
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Figure 7-4
Combined Effects of Distributive
and Procedural Justice
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Justice, Cont’d
 Interpersonal justice
Interpersonal justice is fostered when
authorities adhere to two particular rules.
Respect rule
Propriety rule
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Justice, Cont’d
 Informational justice
Informational justice is fostered when
authorities adhere to two particular rules.
The justification rule
The truthfulness rule
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Figure 7-5
The Effects of
Informational
and
Interpersonal
Justice on
Theft During
a Pay Cut
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Table 7-2
The Four Dimensions of Justice
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Ethics
 Research on ethics seeks to explain why
people behave in a manner consistent with
generally accepted norms of morality, and
why they sometimes violate those norms.
Whistle-blowing
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The Four Component Model of
Ethical Decision Making
 Moral awareness
Ethical sensitivity
Moral intensity
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Table 7-4
The Six Facets of Moral Intensity
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The Four Component Model of
Ethical Decision Making, Cont’d
 Moral judgment
Cognitive moral development theory
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Table 7-7
Stages of Cognitive Moral
Development
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The Four Component Model of
Ethical Decision Making, Cont’d
 Moral intent
The distinction between awareness,
judgment, and intent is important, because
many unethical people know and understand
that what they do is wrong—they just don’t
really care.
One driver of moral intent is moral identity —
the degree to which a person sees him- or
herself as a “moral person.”
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Figure 7-6
The Four Component Model of
Ethical Decision Making
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Figure 7-8
Why Are
Some
Authorities
More Trusted
than Others?
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How Important Is Trust?
 Trust relates to performance because it
increases an employees ability to focus.
 Trust also influences citizenship behavior
and counterproductive behavior because it
allows employees to develop social
exchange relationships instead of
economic exchange relationships with
their employers.
Economic exchange
Social exchange
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Table 7-9
Effects of Trust on Performance
and Commitment
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Corporate Social Responsibility
 Corporate social responsibility
A company’s obligations do not end with profit
maximization.
Organizations have an obligation to do what is
right, just, and fair and to avoid harm.
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Takeaways
 Trust is the willingness to be vulnerable to an
authority based on positive expectations about
the authority’s actions and intentions. Justice
reflects the perceived fairness of an authority’s
decision making and can be used to explain why
employees judge some authorities as more
trustworthy than others. Ethics reflects the degree
to which the behaviors of an authority are in
accordance with generally accepted moral norms.
 Trust can be disposition-based, cognition-based,
or affect-based. Trustworthiness is judged along
three dimensions: competence, character, and
benevolence.
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Takeaways, Cont’d
 The fairness of an authority’s decision making can be
judged along four dimensions: distributive justice,
procedural justice, interpersonal justice, and
informational justice.
 The four-component model of ethical decision making
argues that ethical behavior depends on three concepts.
Moral awareness reflects whether an authority
recognizes that a moral issue exists in a situation. Moral
judgment reflects whether the authority can accurately
identify the “right” course of action. Moral intent reflects
an authority’s degree of commitment to the moral course
of action.
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Takeaways, Cont’d
 Trust has a moderate positive relationship with
job performance and a strong positive
relationship with organizational commitment.
 Organizations can become more trustworthy by
emphasizing corporate social responsibility, a
perspective that acknowledges that the
responsibility of a business encompasses the
economic, legal, ethical, and citizenship
expectations of society.
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