Relationship between interpersonal personality traits and organizational benefits

We were interested in whether the fairness of an employee policy is dependent on their individual need. We further hypothesized that individuals with an other orientation on the self-other orientation scale would find a policy that they do not personally need as fairer. That is, individuals that have a less self-centered or selfish world view will be more likely to find a policy as fair even if they did not personally gain from the policy. A total of 139 (17 male) students participated in the study. Participants read a vignette indicating whether the benefit that organization was offering was congruent or incongruent with their needs. A correlational analysis indicated that participants in the condition where their needs were congruent with the benefit offered rated the policy as fairer than participants in the incongruent scenario ( r (117) = .21, p = .019). Further analysis found that the relationship between fairness and self-other orientation was not significant ( r (117) = .12, p = .189). This relationship was unexpected. Further analysis, found that the expected relationship that self-other orientation would moderate the relationship between policy need and fairness was not supported. The finding that self-other orientation was not related to fairness suggests that individuals that are interested in the welfare of others do not use this orientation when evaluating organizational policies that do not directly benefit them