Due process in performance appraisal: a quasi-experiment in procedural justice

Administrative Science Quarterly,  Sept, 1995  by M. Susan Taylor,  Kay B. Tracy,  Monika K. Renard,  J. Kline Harrison,  Stephen J. Carroll

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The research makes at least three contributions to the existing literature on procedural justice, two theoretical and one practical: (1) extending research on the determinants of procedural justice judgments (Lind and Tyler, 1988) to a due-process intervention and providing additional support for the external validity of procedural justice effects; (2) examining managers' reactions to an intervention increasing procedural justice for their employees at the expense of their own freedom to distort appraisal results; and (3) investigating the impact of a due-process appraisal system on the reactions of employees and managers to their jobs and their organization.

Readers should consider these contributions in light of three potential limitations. First, the public sector organization studied is one that places more emphasis on employment stability than on pay and employee development. This fact may have heightened the salience of the due-process manipulation for employees and strengthened its favorable effects. Second, the employee control group displayed a greater dropout rate than did the due-process group. Although analyses of demographics and pre-survey measures suggest that this did not bias the results, this possibility cannot be completely ruled out. Finally, it may be that the study's pre-post research design may have sensitized participants to the purpose of the research or that differences in the treatment of the due-process and control groups may have demoralized control group members. Analyses of the check variables, however, suggest that neither sensitization nor demoralization were major determinants of the results presented here. Having identified potential weaknesses in the research, we now examine its contributions in greater depth.

Extension of Procedural Justice Research

Employees in the due-process condition of this study perceived greater accuracy and fairness in the appraisal system and greater satisfaction with appraisals than did those in the control group, even though they received significantly lower performance evaluations. Thus it appears that due-process features, including elements of procedural and interactional justice, can increase employees' sense of fairness about organizational processes (Lind and Tyler, 1988).

Surprisingly, the due-process appraisal system did not affect broader job and organizational attitudes for employees, although such results have emerged from previous research, both lab experiments and field studies (Burke and Wilcox, 1969; Lissak, 1983; Kanfer et al., 1987; Nathan, Mohrman, and Milliman, 1991; Moorman, 1992). It seems likely that in actual work settings, employees' reactions to their jobs and organization are affected by many different human resource procedures, including performance appraisal. Employees in this study may have been waiting to see whether changes in the performance appraisal system would lead to other job and organizational changes.

It is also noteworthy that procedural justice effects on behavioral variables, such as the motivation to improve, were nonexistent in this study, despite the fact that the variables were chosen to minimize potential contaminants such as ability and opportunity. This finding strengthens Lind and Tyler's (1988) tentative conclusion that performance increments from enhanced procedural justice have been less consistent in cases of performance evaluation. Due-process-group employees, however, did tend to report stronger behavioral intentions to remain in the organization than did the control group, a finding that replicates results from two earlier studies (Alexander and Ruderman, 1987; Tyler, 1990). In light of growing evidence of procedural justice effects on organizational citizenship behaviors (Konovsky and Folger, 1991; Moorman, 1992), we conclude that increased procedural justice in organizations is more likely to affect the display of discrete behaviors reflecting loyalty and commitment to the organization than ongoing, day-to-day job performance.