Uncertainty management by means of fairness judgments

The world is an uncertain place. For example, many people have jobs with indefinite tenure, and success at work often depends on adaptability and flexibility in the face of an uncertain future (Lord & Hartley, 1998). Rapid changes are happening everywhere and news of layoffs and national and international conflicts reaches us almost daily. Above all, people are unpredictable, and most of us have experienced both unanticipated disappointments and unexpected successes in our personal, work, or political worlds. In this chapter, we explore how people use perceptions of fair or unfair treatment to cope with uncertainty in their daily lives. We present a number of studies, most of them very recent, that address the relationship between uncertainty and fairness judgments. We argue that these studies show that when people feel uncertain or when they attend to the uncertain aspects of their worlds they have especially strong concerns about fairness. In addition, we present data showing that sometimes uncertainty can prompt heuristic processing of fairness information. We use these findings to forge a new, more cognitive, theory of fairness judgments and to suggest a new perspective on how people cope with uncertainty. Fairness plays a key role in people's lives, and a substantial body of research shows that people's beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors are affected greatly by whether they feel they have been treated fairly or unfairly (for overviews, see, e.g., Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996; Folger & Cropanzano, 1998; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992; Tyler & Smith, 1998). In organizational settings, feeling that one has been treated fairly typically leads to a variety of positive consequences, such as higher commitment to organizations and institutions (Moorman, 1991;