Interactional Justice

Interactional justice. Interactional justice is par­ticularly relevant to this analysis because it reflects the interpersonal dimension of fairness. According to Bies and Moag , individ­uals experience interactional injustice when orga­nizational representatives fail to treat them with respect, honesty, propriety, and sensitivity to their personal needs. Contextual factors influence whether or not subordinates experience unfairness when they are the targets of behaviors that fit the present definition of abusive supervision; as Bies and Moag stated, “A person may hold a criterion such as personal respect inviolable . . . however, if rudeness is seen as an expected part of the proce­dure itself, as in a stress interview, then it may not be perceived as unfair because there is an instru­mental purpose to its occurrence” . Sim­ilarly, a drill instructor may be expected to use verbal battery and degradation as part of the pro­cess of divesting military recruits of the values they held prior to boot camp . Nevertheless, beyond a narrow range of con­ texts in which hostility may be tolerated, individ­uals expect others, especially those of higher status, to be aware of communicative acts that constitute face threats, actions that threaten one’s social image and self-image . Consistent with this notion is Mikula, Petri, and Tanzer’s inductively derived typology of everyday experi­ences of injustice, which emphasizes interactional concerns and includes several categories of behav­ior directly relevant to the present focus on abusive supervision (such as unfriendliness and impolite­ ness on the part of authority figures). Consequently, subordinates should experience interactional injus­tice when their supervisors are more abusive.