My Coworkers are Treated More Fairly than Me! A Self-Regulatory Perspective on Justice Social Comparisons

Social comparison processes were integral to the origins of the organizational justice literature, and are incorporated within several justice-based constructs and theories. Yet, despite this, the justice social comparison literature is theoretically underdeveloped; while the extant literature affirms that justice social comparisons influence employee outcomes, it does not explain why, when, or for whom these effects occur. We build new theory on why justice social comparison perceptions influence employee behavior (specifically, helping and instigated incivility) by viewing the phenomenon through a self-regulatory lens. Doing so enables us to identify a novel explanatory mechanism and boundary condition for these effects. In two experience sampling studies, each conducted over multiple weeks, we test our proposed mechanism—envy and self-regulatory resource depletion—against four alternative justice-based mechanisms derived from equity theory, the group engagement model, social exchange theory, and referent cognitions theory. Findings were consistent with our theorizing, verifying that our integration of self-regulation with social comparison processes offers new insights to the justice literature. Overall, our scholarship has the potential to change the conversation about social comparisons in the justice literature by revitalizing a foundational aspect of justice rarely considered in contemporary research.