When Does Giving Voice or Not Matter? Procedural Fairness Effects as a Function of Closeness of Reference Points

The present study examined whether manipulating the closeness of reference points can provide further insights into explaining why people care so much about receiving voice (i.e., the opportunity to express one’s opinion with respect to allocation deci-sions). Participants read a scenario portraying a situation where they had always been a member of the relevant team (i.e., distant referent point condition) or where they had just become a member of the relevant team (i.e., close referent point condition). Thereafter, they were either told that they would receive voice or no voice with respect to the issue of distributing a financial bonus. The results showed that people cared more about voice when they were placed in the distant referent condition rather than in the close referent condition. This effect was strongest on participants ’ positive emotions (i.e., being positive when receiving voice vs. receiving no voice) than on their negative emotions. The findings are discussed in light of procedural fairness, counterfactual thinking, and emotion literature. Since the seminal work of Thibaut and Walker (1975) it is a pervasive finding thatpeople’s fairness judgments are not only influenced by how fair people evaluate the outcomes they receive (distributive justice), but also by how fair they consider the procedures used to determine the outcomes (procedural justice) (Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996; Lind & Tyler, 1988). A vast amount of studies have demonstrated that perceived procedural fairness positively affects people’s evaluations of the outcomes they re-ceive (e.g., Tyler, 1990, Van den Bos et al., 1997). Procedural fairness has also been found to have a positive influence on support and evaluations of authorities (Greenberg