Organizational justice enactment: An agent-focused review and path forward

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Journal of Vocational Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jvb

Organizational justice enactment: An agent-focused review and path forward ⁎

Maja Grasoa, , Jeroen Campsb,e, Nicole Strahc, Lieven Brebelsd a

Department of Management, University of Otago, New Zealand Applied Psychology, Thomas More, Belgium Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, United States of America d Department of Work and Organisation Studies, KU Leuven, Belgium e Occupational & Organisational Psychology and Professional Learning, KU Leuven, Belgium b c

A R T IC LE I N F O

ABS TRA CT

Keywords: Organizational justice, enactment Justice as a dependent variable Culture Morality

Justice enactment reflects the extent to which agents (e.g., supervisors, decision-makers, and others with power to treat others fairly) adhere to or violate justice rules. Despite the soaring interest that this vantage point has received in recent years, the justice literature focusing on the agent has remained rather fragmented. Further, this literature lacks a framework that integrates the recent empirical work, captures the current state of the field, and proposes questions that remain. Our review summarizes the extant findings on justice enactment by addressing two underlying questions: 1) why do agents behave fairly or unfairly? and 2) what helps or impedes agents' ability to adhere to well-established principles of organizational justice? Upon reviewing over forty empirical articles, we propose a path forward to optimize our understanding of justice enactment and its relationship with a host of individual, vocational, and organizational behaviors. We highlight various areas that are particularly well-suited to benefit from further research: 1) investigating additional justice motives, 2) approaching organizational justice enactment as a shared responsibility of targets and agents, 3) assessing justice enactment in agents' and targets' vocational development, 4) exploring the role of justice enactment in individuals' wellbeing, 5) advancing our understanding of cross-cultural factors in enacting justice, and 6) and nesting justice enactment within the context of contemporary culture and morality.

1. Introduction Those endowed with decision-making power ought to be consistent and ethical, immune to influences of biased cognition (Leventhal, 1980), respectful of their subordinates (Bies & Moag, 1986), and they need to ensure their constituents are well-informed (Bies & Moag, 1986) and appropriately compensated for their contributions according to their input (Adams, 1965; Leventhal, 1976; Leventhal, 1980). If these conditions are not met, employees experience decreased well-being or engage in an array of harmful behaviors (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2013; Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001). However, workplace injustice shows little sign of abating, despite the fact that the criteria that promote perceptions of fairness at work have been wellestablished and that both practitioner-oriented (e.g., Davey, 2018) and academic literature (Cropanzano, Bowen, & Gilliland, 2007; Karam et al., 2019) exhort the importance of fair workplace practices. The persistence of injustice is especially evident from a cursory ⁎

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Graso), [email protected] (J. Camps), [email protected] (N. Strah), [email protected] (L. Brebels). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2019.03.007 Received 31 May 2018; Received in revised form 18 March 2019; Accepted 21 March 2019 0001-8791/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Maja Graso, et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2019.03.007

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review of the recent literature that continues to demonstrate relatively large variations in employee justice perceptions and concerns (e.g., Colquitt, Long, Rodell, & Halvorsen-Ganepola, 2015), and from the amount of scholarly interest organizational justice continues to receive (e.g., Cropanzano & Ambrose, 2015; van Dijke & De Cremer, 2016). In order to obtain a better understanding of why injustices continue, it helps to first reflect on the state of the general justice literature. It is evident that until recently, empirical work has mainly been focusing on typologies of justice, employees' perceptions of (un)fair treatment, consequences of (in)justice, and various moderating factors that shape employees' responses to experienced (in) justice.1 Thanks to this immensely fruitful intellectual pursuit, we can now appreciate the importance and power of organizational justice inside and outside the workplace (e.g., Cropanzano & Ambrose, 2015). However, the role of the agent2 has been largely omitted despite the fact that these agents are the stakeholders who are able to shape the work environment into a fairer place for all. A crucial question that remains is why or when agents treat others fairly or unfairly. By not focusing on the manager's or decisionmaker's role in justice enactment, we have been holding these stakeholders accountable for their actions and making recommendations for enacting justice without fully understanding the nuances of their motivation, ability, and discretion to act fairly. We cannot understand, nor can we effectively mitigate the tenacity of justice violations without a thorough understanding of those who have the power to treat others fairly and the factors that help or impede their ability to do so. Numerous thinkers have already recognized this gap in our understanding (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009a; Bies, 2015; Brockner, Wiesenfeld, Siegel, Bobocel, & Liu, 2015; Cojuharenco, Marques, & Patient, 2017; Colquitt & Greenberg, 2003; Cooper & Scandura, 2012, 2015; Folger & Skarlicki, 2001; Li, Masterson, & Sprinkle, 2012; Scott, Colquitt, & Paddock, 2009; van Dijke & De Cremer, 2016; van Knippenberg, De Cremer, & van Knippenberg, 2007). Fortunately, we now also have over forty high-quality empirical justice enactment articles, which allow us to extend past work by deriving patterns among these studies and providing an integrated framework that can inspire future research on this topic. We aim to unite these individual contributions in order to outline how they can allow us to foster our understanding of organizational justice in combination with the dominant employee- or target-oriented vantage point. We review this relatively new, but substantial body of literature with an aim of addressing two core questions: Research Question 1: Why do justice agents behave fairly? Research Question 2: What helps or impedes agents' justice enactment? Based on these questions, we set forth a unifying model as follows (see Fig. 1). This figure summarizes the key conclusions drawn from the body of empirical literature on justice enactment. Consider the motives box in our model. When contemplating our first research question, we ground our model on the leading theoretical perspectives that naturally emerge from the target-oriented vantage point. Just like targets care about justice for reasons related to moral virtue (Folger, 1998, 2001), the formation of strong relationships (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992), and the instrumental benefits that emerge from such relationships (Blau, 1964), we review evidence that these deontological, relational, and instrumental reasons may similarly motivate agents to enact justice (i.e., agent's behavior box). However, unlike their targets, justice agents have unique demands, which leads to unique implications of these bedrock theories. First, justice motivations can be transitory and contingent on agents' or organizations' goals. Second, there are two broad forces that can impact agents' motivations, behavioral intentions, and actual enactment behaviors: 1) factors external to the agent, and 2) factors internal to the agent. Third, justice enactment has unique consequences for the agents themselves (Bernerth, Whitman, Walker, Mitchell, & Taylor, 2016; Johnson, Lanaj, & Barnes, 2014; Margolis & Molinsky, 2008; Zapata, Carton, & Liu, 2016). Consequences can be costs and benefits, and they can be anticipated and unanticipated. Therefore, the existing body of empirical research allows us to speculate on the existence of a feedback loop between consequences and motives (presented in our Fig. 1 as a bi-directional dotted line). This observation allows researchers to approach justice enactment as a within-person phenomenon (Matta, Scott, Colquitt, Koopman, & Passantino, 2017; Monin, Noorderhaven, Vaara, & Kroon, 2013; Scott, Garza, Conlon, & Kim, 2014). In summary, despite multiple motives driving agents' willingness to adhere to workplace justice principles, justice enactment suffers when it is seen as an impediment to agents' achievement of professional and organizational goals. Also, targets play a far more active role than portrayed in the current justice perception literature. By assisting agents in reaching their professional objectives, targets can partially shape their own justice experiences. This major, albeit highly simplified conclusion becomes evident when we synthesize the emerging justice enactment literature. In this review, we detail the articles that led us to these conclusions, and we address the nuances and caveats of our claims. We proceed as follows. First, we set a technical foundation for our review by nesting enactment within a broader framework of the organizational justice literature, and we use that foundation to inform our literature review process. Second, we provide a review of over forty pieces of justice enactment. Finally, we provide a holistic overview of what

1

Some argue that terms justice and fairness are separate constructs (Colquitt & Zipay, 2015). These nuances are recent and have not emerged in articles included in our justice enactment review, as many articles tend to use the two terms interchangeably. Therefore, we will also use the terms justice and fairness interchangeably. 2 When alluding to justice agents, we refer to those who have the power and ability to adhere to principles of organizational justice and enact practices that are the subject of other individuals' justice judgments (Fortin, Blader, Wiesenfeld, & Wheeler-Smith, 2015). Such agents may include those who are bestowed by their organizations with formal decision-making authority (e.g., managers, supervisors, leaders, department heads, and human resource officers), but also those with informal roles (e.g., colleagues or group members with temporary or informal decision-making power). We use the term justice target to refer to those individuals who are on receiving ends of justice treatment, and those who can perceive this treatment as being fair or unfair (e.g., direct subordinates of a justice agent, co-workers of equal organizational status and rank, clients, peers, or customers). While different scholars use terms such as agent or actor, we use the term agent for simplicity and consistency. Table 1 details who the targets and agents are in each study we review. 2

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FACTORS EXTERNAL TO AGENT TRICKLE-DOWN INFLUENCES Superior’s influences CONTEXTUAL INFLUENCES Organizational environment, work demands

MOTIVES Subject to Transitory Influences DEONTOLOGICAL MOTIVES Justice enactment is driven by moral reasons

UPWARD INFLUENCES Target’s behavior and personal characteristics

AGENT’S BEHAVIOR: Enactment of justice

INSTRUMENTAL MOTIVES Justice enactment is driven by self-serving reasons

CONSEQUENCES OF JUSTICE ENACTMENT TO AGENT

RELATIONAL MOTIVES Justice enactment is driven by relational reasons FACTORS INTERNAL TO AGENT: AGENT’S PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS

Fig. 1. Review-based justice enactment model.

we know and do not know, and we conclude by proposing the general questions that remain. 1.1. Setting foundations: Organizational justice and scope of the review 1.1.1. Specifying organizational justice enactment Organizational justice deals with understanding the complexity of fair treatment in a work setting, which is reflected in the classic prescripts of justice. First, distributive justice expectations will be met if outcomes are allocated according to individual contributions of merit, equality, or need, as agreed upon in a particular organization (Adams, 1965; Homans, 1961; Leventhal, 1976). Second, procedural justice expectations will be met if the procedures consider the interests of the groups they represent; are consistent, neutral and unbiased; are based on accurate information; provide opportunity for appeals of outcomes; and are in line with the prevailing ethical norms (Leventhal, 1980; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Finally, interpersonal justice expectations will be met if the justice agent is sincere and polite, and refrains from making any improper remarks, while informational justice expectations will be met if the justice agent is truthful and the target is given thorough explanations about matters pertinent to them in a timely manner (Bies & Moag, 1986; Greenberg, 1993). In aggregation, interpersonal and informational justice dimensions are referred to as interactional justice (Bies & Moag, 1986). We remain faithful to the original articles that we include in our review by interchanging the terms interpersonal/informational justice with interactional justice when appropriate. These tenets simultaneously provide theoretical distinctions about how people view justice and act as practical suggestions for agents of justice (i.e., justice will be enhanced if agents adhere to those principles; Cropanzano et al., 2007). In addition to this faceted view, the literature has also made headway towards assessing overall justice (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009b), which has become especially evident when pursuing newer avenues of inquiry not previously linked to justice (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009b; Ambrose, Wo, & Griffith, 2015; Matta, Scott, Colquitt, Coopman, & Passantino, 2017). In summary, we approach justice enactment as the extent to which agents' behave in line with the well-established principles of organizational justice we summarized above (also see Scott et al., 2009; Table 1). Of interest to us are agents' motivations to behave fairly as well as hindrances to doing so. 1.1.2. Scope and boundaries of our review In order to ensure that our review is of academic and practical value to scholars of vocational behavior, it is crucial to emphasize the boundaries of our scope. First, our focus is on justice enactment and as such, we are interested in an agent-, rather than a target- or observer-oriented approach to this issue. Our underlying goal is to provide a comprehensive assessment of an agent's role in justice enactment, which is not possible if we solely rely on targets' assessments of their own treatment. The agent-focused perspective stands in sharp contrast to articles that focus on understanding how third parties (Blader, Wiesenfeld, Fortin, & Wheeler-Smith, 2013) and targets form perceptions of justice (e.g., Barsky & Kaplan, 2007; Colquitt & Zipay, 2015; Colquitt, Zipay, Lynch, & Outlaw, 2018; Cropanzano, Kirk, & Fortin, 2015; Rodell, Colquitt, & Baer, 2017). These are separate perspectives which are beyond the scope of our 3

4

PJ

PJ

DJ

DJ

DJ

PJ

IJ

PJ

Cornelis et al. (2012)

Cornelis et al. (2013)

Elliott and Meeker (1986)

Ganegoda et al. (2016)

Greenberg (1983)

Heslin and VandeWalle (2011)

Holmvall et al. (2019)

Hoogervorst et al. (2013)

PJ

DJ and PJ

Blader and Chen (2012)

Brebels et al. (2011)

IJ and PJ climate

IJ and PJ

IJ

Type of justice enacteda

Bernerth et al. (2016)

Aryee et al. (2007)

Ambrose et al. (2013)

Author(s) and publication year

Table 1 Summaries of articles included in the review.

University department heads

Supervisors

Supervisors

Participants in decision-making roles, supervisors

Research participants

Managers

Participants in decision-making roles

Participants in decision-making roles

Participants in decision-making roles, supervisors Participants in decision-making roles

Participants in decision-making roles, supervisors

Participants in decision-making roles, supervisors

Participants in decision-making roles

Agent

Experimental study, multisource field study

Experimental studies in decisionmaking roles

Multisource survey

Experimental studies

Experimental studies

Experimental study

Experimental studies, field study

Experimental study, multisource field study

Experimental study, multisource field study

Experimental studies

Multisource, multilevel field study

Multisource field study

Multisource field study

Methodology

(continued on next page)

Supervisors' perceptions of how they are treated by their own superiors influences subordinates' perceptions of interactional justice climate in their work group. This effect is moderated by work group structure; in organic environments, agents' perceptions of their own treatment are more likely to trickle-down than in mechanistic cultures. Supervisors' perceptions of interactional justice from their own supervisors predicts engagement in abusive supervision (as reported by their employees), which in turn affects these employees' perceptions of justice, OCBs, and commitment. Justice climate impacts psychological well-being of justice agents. Authority figures who create positive justice climates experience more positive psychological well-being, in comparison to those who do not foster such climates. Specifically, PJ and IJ climates are related to positive occupational satisfaction and lower emotional exhaustion; IJ climate is also positively related to positive affect. Agent status and power have different effects on justice enactment. Status is positively related to justice enactment, while power is negatively related to justice enactment. An agent's dispositional moral identity is positively related to PJ justice enactment, but particularly so when the agent is prevention focused. Followers' belongingness needs positively impact leaders' procedural justice enactment. This relationship is mediated through interpersonal/group attraction. Followers' belongingness needs and leader empathy both positively impact leaders' procedural justice enactment Recipient factors (contributions to group efforts and financial need) and group factors (group morale and task outcomes) impact agents' allocation decisions for group work. Setting justice goals, through conscious awareness or through priming, increases enactment of justice by enhancing justice saliency. Situational self-awareness (mirror presence) and dispositional selfawareness (high private versus high public personal orientations) impact adherence to distributive justice standards. High private selfconscious agents who are made self-aware use equity distribution standard; high public self-conscious agents who are not made selfaware engage in equality distribution standard. Managers' belief that individual characteristics are malleable (i.e., incrementalism) is positively associated with procedural justice enactment (as assessed by their employees). Leaders report greater intent to enact interactional justice to employees who themselves demonstrate high interactional justice towards the leaders (i.e., are respectful to the leaders). Leaders grant their subordinates voice when the employee shows that they wish to belong to the organization.

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DJ (allocations)

Ip J, Info J, and overall justice

IJ

Kernis and Reis (1984)

Koopman et al. (2015)

Korsgaard et al. (1998)

Masterson (2001)

Major & Adams (1983) Margolis and Molinsky (2008)

DJ and PJ

DJ DJ, PJ, Ip J, and Info J

DJ, PJ, IJ

PJ and Ip J

Johnson et al. (2014)

Long (2015)

DJ, PJ, Ip J and Info J

PJ

Type of justice enacteda

Huang et al. (2017)

van Houwelingen et al. (2017)

Author(s) and publication year

Table 1 (continued)

Instructors

Experiment participants Supervisors, doctors, officers, addiction counselors who need to perform ‘necessary evils’

Supervisors

Participants, managers

Supervisors, participants in decision-making roles

Experiment participants in decision-making roles

Supervisors

Participants in decision-making roles, supervisors

Research participants (undergraduates), lower and middle managers

Agent

Multisource survey

Experiments Interviews

Experiment study, quasi-experimental field study Interviews, surveys

Field studies, experimental study

Experimental study

Experience-sampling field study

(continued on next page)

Agents' efforts to promote fairness are driven by their desire to motivate employees' work efforts and to develop positive relationships with their subordinates. Fairness promotion can be viewed as a set of actions that can help agents accomplish their strategic goals. Individuals' interpersonal orientation influences allocation decisions. Necessary evils are tasks that impose harm on others, but need to be done. Agents use different response styles to perform necessary evils. Those styles (guarded, integrated, mechanical, and detached concern) are based on the extent to which agents express engagement and personalization with the target. Agents who perceive high DJ and PJ report higher organizational commitment, which then causes their targets to perceive them as more fair and they react towards them more positively (satisfaction, re-patronage intentions, and word-of-mouth intentions).

Lower level managers may either assimilate or contrast higher level manager justice enactment, depending on the spatial distance and relationship-dependent self-construal. Study offers insights for agent characteristics, relational, and contextual factors in justice enactment. Employees' conscientiousness and agreeableness impact the extent to which their supervisors comply with justice rules. Supervisors' compliance with justice rules impact employees' perceptions of justice. Procedural justice enactment can lead to resource depletion, while interpersonal justice enactment can be restorative. Depletion, in turn, lowers agents' subsequent OCBs. Replenishing properties of interpersonal justice enactment are strongest for agents who are high in neuroticism, and weakest for those who are high in extraversion. Justice enactment is influenced by dispositional (public and private self-consciousness) and situational self-reflection. Those who are high in public self-consciousness conform to external allocation standard by employing equity-based distribution; those who are high in private self-consciousness conform to the internal (equality) standard. Employee's ingratiation behaviors indirectly lead to higher levels of agent's justice enactment. LMX quality mediates this relationship. This indirect effect from ingratiation, LMX, and justice enactment is stronger for employees who are less popular, than for those who are more popular. Agents treat assertive targets with greater interactional fairness.

Experimental study, multisource field study, cross-sectional survey

Meta-analysis, experimental study, multisource field study

Key findings

Methodology

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PJ

Info J and Ip J

DJ, PJ, Ip J, and Info J

Schuh et al. (2017)

Scott et al. (2007)

Scott et al. (2014)

DJ, PJ, IJ

IpJ

Reb et al. (2018)

Seppälä et al. (2012)

DJ, overall justice

Ip J and Info J

DJ

DJ, overall justice

Qin et al. (2018)

Patient and Skarlicki (2010)

Oc et al. (2015)

Monin et al. (2013)

Overall justice

DJ, PJ and IJ justice climate

Mayer et al. (2007)

Matta, Scott, Colquitt, Koopman, et al, (2017)

Type of justice enacteda

Author(s) and publication year

Table 1 (continued)

Participants, employees

Supervisors

Supervisors

Supervisors

Managers

Supervisors

Supervisors

Participants, supervisors

Research participants, managers

Research participants

Managers of different ranks, employees

Agent

Multisource field study

Experience-sampling field study

Field study

Cross-sectional survey, multisource field study, experimental study

Multisource surveys

Experimental vignette, multisource survey

Experimental study, multisource study

Experiments

Longitudinal assessment of a merger; qualitative study

Experiment, multilevel experience sampling field study

Multisource field study

Methodology

(continued on next page)

Leader agreeableness is positively, and leader neuroticism is negatively related to procedural, interpersonal and informational justice climate. Leader conscientiousness is positively related to procedural justice climate. Furthermore, the relationships between employee-level justice perceptions and outcomes of interest (job satisfaction and job commitment) are stronger when justice climates are high. Overall effect sizes, however, are small. Variably fair treatment is more stressful for targets than consistently unfair treatment. Justice variability exacerbates the link between uncertainty and stress; this relationship is weaker for targets who view their fair treatment as stable, and is stronger for those who view their treatment as variable. Agents high in self-control are perceived as more consistent in their justice decisions. Agents' justice priorities (equality vs. equity) change over and they are contingent upon the immediate goals. They propose three postmerger integration phases: 1) focus on equality, 2) focus on equity, and 3) decreased focus on distributive justice. The nature of subordinates' upward feedback (compliant or candid) impacts agents' enactment of justice. Receiving candid feedback by their subordinates leads agents to behave in a less self-serving manner, than receiving compliant feedback. Agent empathy (trait and state) is associated with increased justice enactment when communicating negative news to the targets. Justice enactment enhancing benefits of empathetic state induction are stronger for agents who are high in moral development. The positive influence of supervisors' value-expression motive on justice enactment is most pronounced when their instrumental motive is low (rather than high). This effect is mediated by supervisors' justification for unjust behavior. Targets of agents who are more mindful view their agents to be more fair, which then enhances the quality of target-agent relationship. Agent mindfulness increases their procedural justice enactment, which then reduces employees emotional exhaustion, and increases employee performance. Agents' perceptions of their subordinate charisma are positively related to subordinates' perceptions of manager's interpersonal justice. This relationship is mediated by manager's perceptions of positive and negative affect directed towards the subordinate. Justice enactment is a faction of agent's transitory motives. Cold (cognitive) motives are associated with agents' adherence to distributive and procedural justice. Hot (affective) motives are associated with adherence to interactional justice. Agents perceive greater discretion over informational and interpersonal justice enactment, which are associated with affective motives. Agents are motivated to act fairly to build trust-based relationships with their targets. Agents' trust in their employees, resulting from positive subordinate behaviors, positively predicts justice enactment.

Key findings

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7 Supervisors, participants in decision-making roles

Participants in decision-making roles

Supervisors

Managers, participants

Police commanders

Supervisors

Participants in decision-making roles

Participants in decision-making roles

Authorities

Supervisors, experiment participants

Agent

Experiments, field survey

Experimental study

Multisource survey

Field study, experimental study

Field study

Multisource survey, longitudinal multisource survey

Experimental studies

Experimental study

Interviews

Experience sampling, cross-sectional, multi-source field study, experimental study

Methodology

An agent's justice enactment is influenced by workload and rewards. High workload compromises agent's ability to be fair. This is particularly pronounced in instances when justice is not rewarded and when the organization signals that other technical tasks are more important, so that supervisors deprioritize justice. Justice enforceability - group members' perception of whether their supervisor can act fairly when there is potential for cheating impacts agents' justice enactment in temporary teams. Increasing agents' self-awareness can help agents with low trait empathy to engage in greater levels of interactional justice. Agent's depletion of self-regulatory resources is negatively associated with their enactment of interactional justice. This depletion leads to self-appraisal gaps (i.e., managers overestimate the extent to which they treat their targets fairly), which can further compromise their ability to enact justice. Agents' own interactional justice perceptions trickle down to their targets' interpersonal justice perceptions. These trickle-down effects occur through two different mechanisms: displaced aggression and social exchange. Police commanders who report higher levels of self-control and who report higher quality relationships with their colleagues report stronger support for organizational justice principles. Justice enactment can have unintended consequences. In contrast to Caucasian supervisors, minority supervisors experienced bias when they adhered to interpersonal justice rules, but they did not experience bias when they violated those rules. Employee trustworthiness (benevolence and integrity) are positively related to agent's interpersonal and informational justice enactment. This path is mediated through the social exchange mechanisms of felt obligation and trust. Implicit mental representations of (un)fairness impact agents' enactment of justice. Priming agents with an image of an unfair leader is associated with unfair behaviour. Perceived trustworthiness of subordinates predicts agent's procedural justice enactment. Agents enact more procedural justice for those who are high in benevolence and low in integrity.

Key findings

DJ = distributive justice; IJ = interactional justice; Ip J = interpersonal justice; Info J = informational justice; PJ = procedural justice; OJ = overall justice.

PJ

Zhao et al. (2015)

a

IJ

Ip J and Info J

Zapata et al. (2013)

Zdaniuk and Bobocel (2013)

Ip J

PJ and IJ

Zapata et al. (2016)

Wolfe et al. (2018)

Ip J and Info J

IJ

Whiteside and Barclay (2018)

Wo et al. (2015)

IJ justice

Whiteside and Barclay (2016)

Overall justice

DJ, PJ, Info J, and Ip J

Sherf et al., in press

Valentine (2018)

Type of justice enacteda

Author(s) and publication year

Table 1 (continued)

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review (see Brockner et al., 2015 for an overview of different approaches to studying justice as a dependent variable). In other words, if studies deal with justice but they make inferences about agents solely from a target's perspective without making links to the agent (or agent-provided responses), they are not included in our review. In order to inform future research on justice enactment, we rely on articles that use agent or target perspectives if they are clearly linked to agents' behavior or personality, and if they can inform us of factors that contribute to justice enactment. Second, we focus on articles that study agents as individual entities (i.e., people) rather than impersonal or abstract organizational systems (e.g., recruitment procedures or organizational change initiatives). We acknowledge that these systems have great interest in justice enactment as well, but they often have various situational constraints (Gilliland & Schepers, 2003) and unique issues of consideration that are beyond the scope of our review (see Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Gilliland et al., 2001; Kouchaki, Smith, & Netchaeva, 2015; Ryan & Ployhart, 2000; Truxillo, Bauer, & McCarthy, 2015). Third, we are not focusing on restorative justice, which emphasizes repairing relationships resulting from interpersonal transgressions (Okimoto & Wenzel, 2015; Wenzel, 2004; Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather, & Platow, 2008), or legal justice (Stein, Steinley, & Cropanzano, 2011). Also, we do not include work on retributive justice, revenge or retaliation (Aquino, Tripp, & Bies, 2006; Brebels, De Cremer, & Sedikides, 2008; Tripp, Bies, & Aquino, 2007), which can describe employees who are ‘doing justice’ in response to a specific violation or a transgression. Instead, we focus on agents who have the power – formal or informal – to adhere to the principles of justice in their daily interactions with their constituents. Fourth, we excluded studies that only loosely fit into our agent-focused perspective by focusing on general resource allocation decisions and social dilemmas (Chen, 1995; de Cremer, 2003; Schmitt, Eid, & Maes, 2003; Stouten, De Cremer, & van Dijk, 2005). We acknowledge that those are invaluable pieces with potential to inform the field of factors influencing distributive justice enactment (see van Dijke & De Cremer, 2016). Nonetheless, we do not focus on rewards allocation literature in our agent-focused review for two reasons. First, the reward allocations literature is far too substantial, tends to be nested within behavioral economics, and thus warrants a review of its own to capture its richness and nuances. Second, those studies are better used to inform our general understanding of justice and cannot be conceptualised as pieces that can help us understand why or when agents enact justice which are the objectives of our review. Therefore, we include studies on distributive justice-based reward allocations, but we do so selectively and only when their focus is on the enactment of established justice criteria detailed above (e.g., Monin et al., 2013; Oc, Bashshur, & Moore, 2015). Finally, we use ethics and deontological motivations (Folger, 1998, 2001) in our discussion on agents' motives to enact justice. However, while ethics and justice have shared origins (Rest, 1986) and remain closely intertwined (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009a; Folger, 1998, 2001; Leventhal, 1980), it is not our aim to conduct a review of the behavioral ethics literature, which answers why individuals do or do not commit ethical transgressions (Tenbrunsel & Chugh, 2015; Treviño, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2016). In summary, the major criteria of inclusion for this review were that the articles could provide advice for improvement to agents and that they advance our understanding of organizational agents who have the power to enact one or all rules of organizational justice. Upon following and perfecting our search process according to the inclusion criteria specified above, we identified 44 articles that clearly focus on enactment of justice. Please see Appendix A for a detailed description of our review methodology. We acknowledge that our list of articles is not definitive, as this literature is progressing quickly. We summarized our articles in Table 1, which tabulates them by author and publication year, type of justice studied, agent characteristics, description of basic methodology, and key conclusion. 2. Agent-focused justice enactment: Review of the literature We structure our integration of the agent-focused justice enactment literature along two broad questions: 1) what motivates agents' enactment of justice, and 2) what helps or impedes agents' enactment of justice? Our attempt to synthesize the existing research along these questions is admittedly limited because the studies that we review ask complex questions, rely on a wide range of theoretical foundations, and use sophisticated and often multi-method tools. As such, they frequently transcend the boundaries we have so imperfectly delineated.3 Nonetheless, our goal is neither to provide an immutable and final framework of agent-focused justice enactment, nor to supplant the existing conceptualizations that have been offered by justice thinkers. Instead, we seek to highlight the broad underlying linkages between the existing empirical studies at this point in time in an effort to provide a framework for scholars of vocational behavior and inspire future research (per Rousseau, Manning, & Denyer, 2008 recommendations). 2.1. What motivates agents to enact justice? The answer to what motivates agents to enact justice lies in three sets of explanations: 1) deontological motives (Folger, 1998, 2001), 2) instrumental or self-serving motives (Blau, 1964; Homans, 1961) and 3) relational motives (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Blader, 2003; Tyler & Lind, 1992). Our synthesis of the justice enactment motives complements and extends the early frameworks (Ambrose & Schminke, 2009a; Scott et al., 2009) that have been offered before the emergence of a more substantial empirical body of literature. Although the majority of the articles that we review do not directly test the above-mentioned motivational forces, nearly all of them 3 A typical example of model-specific boundary transcendence is evident in van Houwelingen et al. (2017). Their study focuses on trickle-down effects of higher-level unfairness, manager's self-construal, and physical environment. As such, we reference their study in multiple sections when discussing agent characteristics, context, and motivation.

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use one or more of these motives to build their theoretical foundation. We first provide a brief explanation for each of the three motives separately, and then we focus the majority of our discussion to implications of the interplay between them. 2.1.1. Deontological motives for justice enactment: Enacting justice as an end in itself Just like employees care about justice for deontological reasons (Folger, 1998, 2001), scholars of justice enactment have similarly predicted that agents could be motivated to behave fairly because doing so is the right thing to do; it is a matter of moral imperative (Qin, Ren, Zhang, & Johnson, 2017). Studies on justice enactment render support for this motivational drive. In one of the earlier studies on this topic, Brebels, De Cremer, van Dijke, and van Hiel (2011) suggest that enacting procedural justice is a matter of morality for agents. In other words, agents are fair when they wish to retain a perception of themselves as moral individuals (i.e., moral identity; Aquino & Reed, 2002). Surprisingly, however, despite morality comprising the foundational building block of organizational justice, the deontological perspective of justice enactment has received scant attention by itself. Instead, it tends to be studied as one of multiple potential motives, often assessed along with instrumental or relational reasons (e.g., Ganegoda, Latham, & Folger, 2016; Long, 2015; Patient & Skarlicki, 2010; Qin et al., 2017). 2.1.2. Instrumental4 motives: Justice as means to an end Targets care about fairness outcomes for instrumental reasons (Adams, 1965; Blau, 1964; Homans, 1961). This was one of the seminal observations that kindled the entire field of organizational justice. However, agents are also motivated to enact justice because doing so can be beneficial for them and can allow them to obtain desired outcomes from their targets. Consider how this process unfolds. Greenberg (1983) suggested that agents who have power to enact justice might be driven to make distributive justice decisions to serve their own self-interest and to promote a positive image of themselves; agents distribute rewards fairly because doing so will help them engage in impression-management. Monin et al. (2013) showed how agents stand to gain from employing different distribution rules in an organization that is undergoing a significant change, such as a merger or an acquisition. If an organization wishes to energize their employees and if socio-political matters are of primary concern, they might first opt to promote the equality principle in distributing rewards. However, once the most tumultuous periods of organizational change have passed, decision-makers may no longer benefit from treating everybody the same. Instead, they might find themselves needing to adjust their strategy to create value, so they shift their focus towards promoting equity (Monin et al., 2013). 2.1.3. Relational motives: Justice as relational management People are driven to construct complex, sustainable, and fulfilling relationships (Fiske, 1992) and fairness, as a relational construct, is strongly conducive to the development of such relationships (Lind & Tyler, 1988). Therefore, it is not surprising that the motive to pursue meaningful, professional relationships is at the core of the seminal justice literature largely pioneered by Thibaut and Walker (1975), and subsequently by Lind, Tyler, and colleagues (Lind, 2001; Lind, Kray, & Thompson, 1998; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Blader, 2003; Tyler & Lind, 1992). However, the overwhelming endorsement of the justice motive among agents lies in tightly intertwined principles of relational and instrumental motives. Justice enactment is a matter of social exchange, serving an instrumental purpose to both parties (Blau, 1964; Homans, 1961). These theories have explained why employees care about justice and why they react against those who wrong them: just treatment will lead to positive relationships with their superiors, which will then yield positive outcomes. Similarly, scholars have contemplated that agents will enact justice because doing so will strengthen their relationships with targets and help them achieve their goals. Tenets of relational motives and social exchange have been used as a theoretical foundation of numerous recent justice enactment studies (Bernerth et al., 2016; Blader & Chen, 2012; Cornelis, Van Hiel, & De Cremer, 2012; Cornelis, Van Hiel, De Cremer, & Mayer, 2013; Hoogervorst, Cremer, & Dijke, 2013; Seppälä, Lipponen, PirttiläBackman, & Lipsanen, 2012; van Houwelingen, van Dijke, & De Cremer, 2017; Wo, Ambrose, & Schminke, 2015; Zapata, Olsen, & Martins, 2013; Zhao, Chen, & Brockner, 2015). 2.1.4. Interplay of deontological, instrumental, and relational motives We have provided a brief review of the three core motives that can impact agents' enactment of justice. Justice is ultimately a social phenomenon (Adams, 1965; Leventhal, 1980; Lind et al., 1998; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Rest, 1986; Tyler & Lind, 1992). Hence, it is unlikely that each of the three motives would impact agents' actions in isolation. Instead, these motives frequently co-occur and corroborate to guide an agent's behavior (e.g., Ganegoda et al., 2016; Long, 2015; Qin et al., 2017; Scott et al., 2014). This allows us to speculate that because these motives shift in their importance and priorities, agents' justice enactment will move in tandem (Scott et al., 2009; Scott et al., 2014). By integrating these articles in our review, we echo the voices of their authors and we set forth two conclusions based on the interplay between different justice motives: 1) Agent motives are transitory, and 2) Justice enactment can have unanticipated costly or beneficial consequences for agents, which can subsequently impact their motivation and ability to be fair. 2.1.5. Transitory nature of justice enactment motives Justice motives are malleable and they reflect agents' needs, affect, or goals. Let us illustrate this important point with one of the 4 Thibaut and Walker (1975) set forth a control model of justice. In this model, control is treated as an instrumental or self-serving element of relational justice. When adapted to an agent, these nuances between instrumental and relational motives yield unique implications. Therefore, we first discuss the two separately, and then discuss them jointly when appropriate.

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most comprehensive studies on that topic. Scott et al. (2014) suggest that justice enactment can be better understood as a withinagent, rather than a between-agent phenomenon (also see Johnson et al., 2014 for a similar endorsement of within-person perspective to studying justice enactment). The reason why a within-agent framework potentially offers a more suitable understanding of justice lies in the transitory nature of the motives driving agents' behavior at any point in time. Specifically, they explored cognitive and affective motives to justice enactment. In line with social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), Scott et al. (2014) contemplated that managers might be motivated to use justice for instrumental reasons in an attempt to elicit compliance and observe other positive behavior (i.e., cognitive motives). They might also be motivated to enact justice as an impression management tool, or they might simply wish to establish an environment of justice as an end in itself (i.e., deontological motives). In addition to these cognitive motives, an agent might be more likely to enact justice if they have high positive and low negative affect. Interpersonal justice tends to be perceived by agents as more discretionary, implying a level of moral responsibility (Folger, 2001; Patient & Skarlicki, 2010). Such discretion can allow interpersonal justice adherence to be associated with affective states, while distributive justice tends to be perceived by agents as less discretionary and adherence is associated more with cognitive factors (Scott et al., 2009). Furthermore, both factors are subject to variation and saliency of these models at different times. Scott et al. (2014) clearly focused on the whys of this transitory approach. However, numerous other scholars have explored transiency of motives in different ways. For example, Monin et al. (2013) showed how agents employ different distribution rules when pursuing different goals (i.e., value creation versus stability), while others have shown how agents' enactment changes as a function of saliency of deontological or self-interested motives (Ganegoda et al., 2016; Qin et al., 2017). Some have cleanly illustrated that justice enactment may often compete with various technical tasks for agents' attention (Sherf, Venkataramani, & Gajendran, in press). If non-justice-related tasks are linked to clear rewards, while justice enactment is not rewarded or is deprioritized, agents' ability to treat their constituents fairly will likely suffer (Sherf et al., in press). Similarly, Blader and Chen (2012) showed that if agents pursue power (an instrumental, non-justice motive) rather than status (a relational motive), justice enactment will also suffer. In summary, this line of research suggests that agents' motivations for enacting justice are fluid and can often pale in comparison to other, non-justice motives that would allow agents to achieve some other goals. Agents might certainly be motivated to enact justice, but they still need to be able to meet their own work objectives (Hoogervorst et al., 2013; Sherf et al., in press). Furthermore, while some studies suggest that enacting justice for the sake of justice itself is not the dominant drive for fairness enactment (see Scott et al., 2014, p. 1585), others do seem to suggest that deontological motives are crucial (Brebels et al., 2011; Qin, Huang, Johnson, Hu, & Ju, 2018). In isolation, each of these motives provide insufficient means to fully explain justice enactment behavior, particularly if justice motives are competing with other occupational forces. 2.1.6. Justice enactment has consequences for the agent Enacting justice has consequences for the agents themselves. These costs and/or benefits can be intended or unintended. Justice enactment is costly for the agent and it often requires effort, time, discretion, as well as significant cognitive resources (Ganegoda et al., 2016; He, Fehr, Yam, Long, & Hao, 2017; Johnson et al., 2014; Koopman, Matta, Scott, & Conlon, 2015; Lind & Bos, 2002; Margolis & Molinsky, 2008; Monin et al., 2013; Patient, 2011; Patient & Skarlicki, 2010; Scott et al., 2009; Whiteside & Barclay, 2018). In certain instances, granting employees input or higher control over particular decision-making processes could even be risky for the employees themselves, as well as for the organizations (as discussed by Hoogervorst et al., 2013), and being unfair can at times be a more self-beneficial approach (see theoretical foundation of Qin et al., 2017). At the same time, justice enactment can also be beneficial for agents (Qin et al., 2017). In order to appreciate the extent of this argument, let us consider some of the recent research on the topic of these potential costs and benefits of enacting justice. Johnson et al. (2014) found that enacting procedural justice depletes agents' self-regulatory resources. This is a crucial finding as procedural justice is one of the central, oldest, and most celebrated tenants of organizational justice. Yet until recently, nobody demonstrated that following the six prescripts of procedural justice (Leventhal, 1980) requires significant effort and can be depleting for the agent. Of particular relevance for employees and organizations is the finding that this depletion due to justice enactment can in fact have unanticipated and negative consequences as it spills over to the next day, leading to reduced organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs). On a positive note, Johnson et al. (2014) illustrated that enacting interpersonal justice replenishes agent's selfregulatory resources. Interpersonal justice is relationship-oriented and it involves being kind and respectful towards others. They also revealed that particularly introverted and neurotic supervisors benefit from the replenishing effect of interpersonal justice enactment. The potential of positive consequences of justice enactment were further comported by Bernerth et al. (2016), who observed that agents who succeed in installing procedural or interpersonal justice climates in their work groups experience psychological benefits (i.e., they report higher occupational satisfaction, less emotional exhaustion, and higher positive affect). Even before agents actually enact justice and experience mental depletion (Johnson et al., 2014), they may anticipate that in certain cases, being fair can be treacherous and costly. Margolis and Molinsky (2008) illustrate how the cost of justice enactment manifests in a form of psychological discomfort, particularly when agents need to deliver unpleasant or bad news to their subordinates or constituents (i.e., delivering ‘necessary evils’ such as announcing layoffs). Their findings indicate that agents frequently deal with uncomfortable, but inevitable components of their jobs by either engaging and personalizing their interactions with targets who need to hear bad news, or by distancing themselves from these targets (Margolis & Molinsky, 2008, p. 862). The former method involving engagement and personalization appears to lessen the psychological cost. This interpersonal relationship-improving approach comports with previously discussed findings on the replenishing potential of interpersonal justice (Johnson et al., 2014). Zapata et al. (2016) illustrated a particularly dark, unanticipated cost of justice enactment by showing how agents of minority backgrounds experience differential and negative treatment for acting unfairly, but they also experience such treatment for acting fairly. The authors suggest that for agents from stigmatized minority groups, interpersonal justice enactment is a “double-edged 10

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sword” (Zapata et al., 2016, p. 1169). Specifically, they observed paradoxical findings where minority supervisors faced bias from their targets when they engaged in, rather than violated, fair treatment. Their study identifies a unique cost and raises a deeply thought-provoking question that goes counter to widely communicated calls for almost uniform endorsement of justice enactment (e.g., Cropanzano et al., 2007). Instead, it raises a possibility that not all justice enactment is equally beneficial to agents (also see Brockner, Wiesenfeld, & Diekmann, 2009). 2.1.7. Summary Because the interplay between the three motivating principles of agents' justice behavior is complex, assessing each motivation in isolation can present a limited view. This is largely due to the transitory nature of justice motives, as well as the anticipated and unanticipated costs/benefits that enacting justice actually have on the agents themselves. Deontological principles suggest that agents care about justice as an end in and of itself (Folger, 1998, 2001). However, agents' objectives or organizational influences may also compete for their attention. This could make justice enactment based on moral principles too costly in the light of other work demands. If potent enough, those influences could jeopardize agents' ability to be fair (Sherf et al., in press). We maintain that the enactment of justice needs to be congruent with agents' goals, to at least some extent. Thus, deontological motivations by themselves are, unfortunately, insufficient to guarantee justice enactment at all times. Similarly, relational theories suggest that justice is of crucial value because it helps parties cultivate meaningful relationships (Lind et al., 1998; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992). This would allow us to contemplate that targets will be treated more fairly when they do (versus do not) communicate the aspiration of developing a long-term, high-quality relationship with their agent, especially when the agent sees relational value in enacting justice. Indeed, our review demonstrates that agents are selective in enacting fair treatment (please see section 2.2.2). Keeping these lessons in mind, we shift our attention towards the more specific descriptions of forces that either help agents be fair or jeopardize their efforts to do so. 2.2. What helps or impedes agents' enactment of fairness? We identify two broad forces that can help or impede agents' enactment of justice: internal (i.e., an agent's personal characteristics) and external (i.e., influences that come from an agent's organizational environment.). We recognize three sets of external influences: upward (target-based) influences, downward (trickle-down) influences, and contextual (organizational and vocational) influences. We award individual attention to each of those forces. 2.2.1. Internal forces influencing justice enactment: Agents' characteristics Agents' self-perceived justice rule adherence and employee perceptions of justice tend to closely align (Zapata et al., 2013). However, agents are not always aware of their justice enactment and some agents possess personal characteristics that make them more likely to enact justice than others. Heslin and VandeWalle (2011) investigated how agents' implicit person theory (IPT; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995) influences the extent to which they engage in procedural justice. This theory suggests that individuals can have two underlying beliefs about personal characteristics of others; they can assume that personal characteristics are fixed (i.e., entity IPT), or they can assume that they are changeable and malleable with time (i.e., incremental IPT). They found that agents' incrementalism is positively related with procedural justice during a performance appraisal. This suggests that some agents might have implicit orientation that influences the extent to which they are willing to develop their subordinates and ultimately, enact justice (Heslin & VandeWalle, 2011). Other agent characteristics involve those that are directly or indirectly related to their ability to form relationships with others, or to carefully adhere to numerous tenets of justice enactment. For example, high moral identity, which indicates the extent to which morality is central to one's self-concept (Aquino & Reed, 2002), was positively linked with justice rule adherence (Brebels et al., 2011). Certain agent characteristics can even influence their justice enactment beyond the transitory nature of enactment motives and its unanticipated costs/benefits. Matta, Scott, Colquitt, Coopman, et al. (2017) observed that managers with higher trait selfcontrol (i.e., restraint against indulging in potentially disruptive behaviors) were less impulsive, resulting in greater likelihood and consistency of justice rule adherence across time. This consistency made them appear more predictable in the eyes of their constituents, which attenuated the negative consequences of uncertainty otherwise experienced by employees. The results observed by Matta and colleagues (2017) were further comported by another recent study in law enforcement, which found that higher trait selfcontrol and relationship quality among police managers corresponded to a stronger desire to endorse the principles of organizational justice (Wolfe, Nix, & Campbell, 2018). Similarly, Schuh, Zheng, Xin, and Fernandez (2017) and Reb, Chaturvedi, Narayanan, and Kudesia (2018) assessed the consequences of agents' mindfulness on their justice enactment and employee outcomes. Mindfulness is viewed as a practice that can replenish cognitive resources and improve an individual's self-control (Creswell, 2017; Davis & Hayes, 2011). Schuh et al. (2017) demonstrated that being mindful (both as a disposition and as a temporary state) relates positively to leaders' enactment of procedural justice. Furthermore, they also observed that leader mindfulness relates to enhanced target performance through increased justice perceptions and reduced emotional exhaustion. The relevance of mindfulness to justice enactment is further supported by Reb et al. (2018). They found that higher self-rated mindfulness was positively related to agents' interpersonal justice behaviors (as perceived by their subordinates), which then increased the quality of the leader-member relationship and the performance of their subordinates. With respect to relational motives for justice enactment, it stands to reason that agents will be more likely to enact justice if they possess personality traits that allow them to form and value stronger relationships with subordinates. This idea is evident in several 11

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studies. Major and Adams (1983) examined justice enactment as a function of agent's interpersonal orientation (IO), which reflects the extent to which individuals are interested in others' feelings. They observed that those high in IO awarded monetary rewards more equally than those who score low on IO. For high-IO agents, this effect emerged regardless of whether agents' allocations were made publicly or privately. Low-IO agents, however, were more likely to reward allocations equally when the allocation decisions were made public than when those decisions were made privately. Numerous studies in justice enactment took interest in the construct of empathy and its positive relationship with agents' justice enactment (Cornelis et al., 2013; Patient & Skarlicki, 2010; Whiteside & Barclay, 2016). Broadly, empathy refers to the reactions of one individual to the experiences of another (Davis, 1983). As one's tendency to understand and feel empathic concern towards another individual's observed or anticipated suffering, it is a plausible predictor of justice enactment (Patient & Skarlicki, 2010). Indeed, Patient and Skarlicki (2010) showed that managers' trait empathy positively predicted their enactment of interpersonal and informational justice when delivering bad news about upcoming organizational layoffs. What is of notable value to justice practitioners is that this work also provided direct evidence for improving agents' justice enactment through inducing empathy. By inducing empathy through encouraging agents to view the situation from the perspective of their constituents, agents engaged in treatment that was rated as higher in interactional justice in comparison to the control group. Furthermore, the effectiveness of this induction was highest for those categorized at Kohlberg's post-conventional reasoning levels. Cornelis et al. (2013) also provided evidence that leaders high (versus low) in empathy (trait and induced state) showed a greater inclination to adhere to procedural justice rules towards their followers (see Blader & Rothman, 2014 for a nuanced illustration of positive and negative effects of empathy on preferential treatment in groups, which is a construct that is loosely related to justice enactment). Whiteside and Barclay (2016) directly built on Patient and Skarlicki's (2010) research to examine the effect of self-awareness on justice enactment. Specifically, they observed that when they increased agents' momentary self-awareness, their ability to enact interactional justice improved despite having low trait empathy (see Greenberg, 1983; Kernis & Reis, 1984 for similar and related studies on the role of self-awareness in enactment of justice). These findings are optimistic for justice agents, because they show that even agents who are low in dispositional empathy can improve their justice enactment through enhancing their self-awareness. Finally, drawing on the Big Five framework of personality, Mayer, Nishii, Schneider, and Goldstein (2007) investigated whether leaders' personality could predict the presence of procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice climates. While leader agreeableness - which has a relational orientation - was positively related to the three aforementioned types of justice, leader neuroticism was negatively related to these justice dimensions. Leader conscientiousness was positively related only to procedural justice climate, while leader openness to experience was not significantly related to any type of justice climate. In summary, agent characteristics drive justice enactment towards targets. Those characteristics allow agents to be better at cultivating good relationships with their targets (empathy, self-awareness, mindfulness, agreeableness, interpersonal orientation), effectively attending to nuances of justice criteria, weathering the effects of non-justice related demands (conscientiousness, selfregulation, self-control, mindfulness), and acting in accordance with their moral values. 2.2.2. Upward influences: Targets' characteristics and behavior Recall that the desire to form productive relationships and to reap the benefits of such well-functioning professional partnerships is one of the core forces behind agents' fair treatment of their targets, and behind targets' interest in justice (Adams, 1965; Blau, 1964; Leventhal, 1980; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992). There is, however, an ominous possibility that emerges when these initial, target-focused theories are reversed and applied to justice agents: What if there is no benefit (or no perceived benefit) to developing relationships with certain employees? It stands to reason that in such cases, targets who yield little benefit to the agent might not be treated as fairly as others. Indeed, recent justice enactment work provides empirical support for this speculation. This differential treatment gives additional credence to the fragility of deontological motivations, and it highlights the importance of ensuring that justice enactment does not hinder agents to accomplish their instrumental goals. Therefore, when assessing what helps or impedes agents' ability to enact justice, one of the core answers lies in the targets themselves and their personal characteristics that elicit specific treatment from their agents.5 What are these characteristics? We maintain that these are the characteristics that directly or indirectly help the agents reach their objectives. 2.2.3. Targets' role in developing positive relationships with their agents Consider two relatively visible qualities of a target – charisma and ingratiation. Scott, Colquitt, and Zapata-Phelan (2007) showed how targets' charisma is related to agents' adherence to interpersonal justice (as assessed by the target). This relationship unfolds in such a way that charismatic targets elicit more positive and less negative sentiments from their agent, which ultimately leads to increased interpersonal justice. Similarly, Koopman et al. (2015) revealed that agents adhere more closely to justice principles towards employees who engage in ingratiation behavior towards them, as opposed to targets who do not. These employees frequently praise their supervisors for their accomplishments, take interest in their personal life, complete personal favors for them, or engage in 5

When discussing agents' treatment of their constituents, it is crucial to note one caveat. The distinctions between justice and injustice are rather nuanced, remain underexplored in the general justice literature (Colquitt, 2015; Gilliland, 2008; Rupp & Spencer, 2006), and have not emerged in articles included in our review. As a result, we cannot confidently state that agents will treat some employees unfairly, but merely that they will treat those who will help them reach their objective more fairly than others. This improved justice enactment will come from awarding significantly more time, attention, and care that following tenets of procedural (Leventhal, 1980), interpersonal, informational (Bies, 2015; Bies & Moag, 1986), or distributive (Leventhal, 1976; Leventhal, 1980) justice mandates. 12

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other impression-management behaviors (as assessed by Wayne & Liden, 1995). However, this relationship between ingratiation and fair treatment does not occur directly. Instead, targets' ingratiating behaviors first leads to higher quality relationships with supervisors (i.e., LMX), which in turn invites improved justice. This finding has received additional support in Wolfe et al. (2018). In summary, targets who help agents in developing high quality relationships are treated more fairly than those who do not. 2.2.4. Target trustworthiness In line with relational theories of justice, an important element of forming solid leader-member relationships is trust. As a multifaceted construct that involves ability, benevolence, and integrity (Mayer, Davis, & Schoorman, 1995), it is a promising antecedent to justice enactment. In fact, the trustworthiness of targets has been the subject of multiple justice enactment-based inquiries, and in most of the studies, the conclusion emerges that trustworthy targets are treated more fairly than those who are considered less trustworthy. First, Zapata et al. (2013) investigated the relationship between supervisors' perceptions of employee trustworthiness and informational and interpersonal justice enactment. They observed that agents are more likely to report that they adhere to interpersonal and informational justice rules when they perceive that they can trust their own employees and when they feel a sense of obligation towards them. In turn, these supervisor ratings of justice adherence lead to greater perceptions of interpersonal and informational justice for employees. Of interest to our discussion on the role of different motives that spur justice enactment is Zapata and colleagues' finding that employee benevolence had the strongest indirect relationship with justice enactment, while employee ability showed the weakest relationship of all the components of trustworthiness. This seems to indicate that the relational motive, through employee benevolence, plays a pivotal role in justice enactment. The limited influence of employee ability, however, could be an indication that its impact is more grounded in the instrumental motive (rather than the relational motive), which might be less relevant when it comes to interpersonal and informational justice enactment. Zhao et al. (2015) further built upon Zapata et al.'s (2013) findings by assessing how employee trustworthiness is linked with agents' procedural justice enactment. They observed that two different aspects of employee trustworthiness (benevolence and integrity) affect managers' procedural justice. While Zapata et al. (2013) showed that the integrity aspect of trust positively relates to agents' informational and interpersonal justice enactment, Zhao et al. (2015) observed that it is actually inversely related to procedural justice enactment. In other words, while subordinates who are benevolent and have high integrity tend to be treated with greater interpersonal and informational justice, those who are low in integrity are treated with greater procedural fairness. The authors speculated that the reasons behind these conflicting findings are likely motivational, which comports with our earlier discussion of the transitory nature of justice motives (Scott et al., 2014). Supervisors might enact justice towards benevolent employees because it allows them to develop deeper relationships with their constituents, while they might enact justice towards low-integrity employees as a means of exercising control over them and to avoid future harm (Zhao et al., 2015). In other words, the same agent might choose to enact justice towards their constituents for different reasons. 2.2.5. Targets' belongingness needs Individuals tend to have a strong need to belong in their social groups (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). The connection between individuals' need to belong and justice enactment was explored across three studies. Cornelis et al. (2013) and Cornelis et al. (2012) both investigated whether followers' need to belong impacts leaders' procedural justice rule adherence. They observed that agents tend to give more voice and are seen as more procedurally fair when their targets have high belongingness needs (Cornelis et al., 2012). This effect becomes more pronounced when the agent is more empathic (Cornelis et al., 2013). Hoogervorst et al. (2013) further showed that a justice agent will be more likely to grant their constituents voice in the organizational decision-making process if they believe that those employees exhibit genuine desire to belong to the organization and that targets feel at home, because those employees might be more likely to use their voice in a way that it aligns with the agent's and organization's interests. 2.2.6. Targets' behavior A smaller set of studies examined the extent to which targets' behavior impacts their agents' justice enactment. In a series of experimental studies, Holmvall, Stevens, and Chestnut (2019) show how interactional justice enactment follows the norm of reciprocity in relationships (Gouldner, 1960). Specifically, they show that agents report stronger intent to engage in interactional justice when their own targets have a history of treating their agents with respect, compared to targets who treat them with disrespect. Relatedly, Seppälä et al. (2012) revealed that agents show higher levels of justice enactment towards those subordinates who exhibit higher compliance, helping behavior, and performance. They also provided support for a mediation model, in which subordinates' helping behavior and performance are positively related to supervisors' trust in their subordinates. In turn, this feeling of trust is positively related to distributive, procedural, and interactional fairness enactment. Korsgaard, Roberson, and Rymph (1998) showed that agents treat more assertive targets with higher interactional fairness. Those assertive employees are the ones who effectively demonstrate confidence, listen, and engage with their agents. Huang et al. (2017) focused on even more elemental components of followers' personality by observing that employees' conscientiousness and agreeableness were positively linked with supervisors' justice rule adherence and employees' own perceptions of the extent to which their supervisor treats them fairly. Oc et al. (2015) further comport these earlier findings. They showed how targets directly influence the extent to which an agent behaves in a self-serving manner when allocating resources (i.e., engaging in distributive justice). They found that when targets provide honest, as opposed to compliant-based feedback, agents respond to it by behaving in a less selfserving manner (Oc et al., 2015). In summary, this collection of articles allows us to extract two central themes: 1) agents are motivated to foster good relationships with their subordinates, and 2) subordinates can influence the way that their agents treat them. Therefore, employees who elicit fair 13

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treatment from their agents are those who possess characteristics that allow agents to develop strong relationships with those targets and who help agents reach their own professional objectives. This comports with relational and instrumental motives to justice enactment. 2.2.7. Downward influences: (In)justice enactment as a result of trickle-down effects An interesting set of studies focuses on one specific aspect of the agent's external environment - agents' perceptions of how they are treated by their own superiors. Trickle-down effects from upper echelons of the organization have the power to impact justice agents themselves, which in turn impact their targets (Ambrose, Schminke, & Mayer, 2013; Aryee, Chen, Sun, & Debrah, 2007; Masterson, 2001; van Houwelingen et al., 2017; Wo et al., 2015; Zdaniuk & Bobocel, 2013). These studies suggest that when organizations consider how fairly their employees are treated overall, part of their answer might lie in agents' own superiors. For example, while not explicitly focusing on agents' own justice enactment, Masterson (2001) tested a model in which agents' favorable justice perceptions trickle down from agents to their targets, which then cycle back to the agent in the form of more positive target reactions (i.e., OCBs). Ambrose et al. (2013), however, expanded Masterson's (2001) model further through focusing on agent perceptions of their own interactional treatment by authorities. They concluded that if the agent perceives that their own superior treats them unfairly, it will lead to a lower interactional justice climate among the focal agent's subordinates. They also showed that these effects are stronger for organizations with organic structures. In contrast to mechanistic cultures, organic cultures tend to have weaker situations, rely more on face-to-face interaction, and be more flexible and decentralized. Wo et al. (2015) relied on theories of social exchange, social learning, and displaced aggression to provide a theoretical explanation for the trickle-down effects of organizational transgressions. When testing this theory, they found that the extent to which the agents themselves experience interpersonal and informational justice impacts their own adherence to these justice principles when dealing with their own subordinates. Like other studies that have shown that justice agents are influenced by emotions and cognition (Scott et al., 2014), Wo et al. (2015) found support for some of these mechanisms. In particular, informational justice trickles down to targets through agents' sense of obligation to the organization and its goals (i.e., social exchange mechanism, which evoke cognitive states), while interpersonal justice trickles down via displaced aggression, which evokes affective states). This finding invites speculation about the link between various trickle-down effects and the three motives underlying justice enactment, which has received little explicit attention. For example, if the effect is driven by social learning, this could be manifestation either of the organization-signalled deontic motive that clearly communicates the importance of justice by itself, or it can reflect the relational motive where justice enactment is beneficial and expected in a particular organization, because it leads to development of good relationships. Zdaniuk and Bobocel (2013) challenge us to consider the idea that this process of trickle-down justice can occur even more subtly. They showed that priming participants with an image of an unfair leader causes agents to exercise lower interactional fairness themselves, compared to participants primed with an image associated with a fair or neutral leader. The fact that even implicit mental representations of unfairness have the power to impact agents' enactment of justice is concerning, as repeated exposure to unfair leaders can impact a perhaps well-meaning agent and inadvertently cause them to act in a way that is more unjust than they believe, thus providing an explanatory mechanism for both trickle-down models used in abusive supervision (Aryee et al., 2007; Tepper, 2007; Tepper, Simon, & Park, 2017), and those observed in justice research (Ambrose et al., 2013; Masterson, 2001; Wo et al., 2015). Van Houwelingen et al. (2017) also showed that the way managers see themselves in relation to their own leader impacts the extent to which they mimic or contrast their leader's behavior. These authors specifically studied relational-interdependent selfconstrual, where higher levels of this construal would depict a manager who views their relationship with their superiors as an important part of their self-image. This dynamic unfolds in such a way that if a manager has a relatively high level of relationalinterdependent self-construal, they are more likely to mimic the treatment they experience themselves. On the other hand, a manager who has a relatively low level of such construal might contrast higher order treatment they experience. 2.2.8. External factors: Context Finally, we turn our attention to the last set of studies that can help us understand the factors that help or impede agents' justice enactment: an agent's goals, work demands, and organizational context. Complexities of organizational life might not always award agent with discretion to act fairly (Scott et al., 2009), and organizational determinants, such as organizational restructuring or economic downturns, might greatly influence the process (see Gilliland & Schepers, 2003). Ganegoda et al. (2016) demonstrated that setting justice goals that highlight the importance of clear work and organizational objectives (as potential implicit and contextual factors) can influence an agent's justice enactment. Specifically, participants who were explicitly asked to set a goal to negotiate a fair outcome and participants who were primed with fairness messages prior to the negotiation proposed deals with greater profit equality between the two parties, were more likely to perceive a counter deal as being fair overall, and were more likely to accept the counter-offer compared to those who received no justice prime or who were not asked to be aware of justice enactment. Another set of studies focuses on work demands. As discussed earlier, Sherf et al. (in press) demonstrated the connectedness of workload and justice rule adherence, as they observed that numerous daily demands that managers experience and perceptions of heaviness of their workloads correspond to their subordinates' assessments of justice enactment. Whiteside and Barclay (2018) focused more closely on regulatory reasons that could similarly lead to justice enactment failure. They conducted a series of experimental studies and observed that the extent to which justice agents value interactional justice and are able to enact it is in part contingent upon the availability of their self-regulatory resources. This extends the previously discussed research on the role of agents' personal characteristics in justice enactment. Depletion of those self-regulatory resources due to numerous daily work 14

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demands not only compromises agents' ability to act fairly, but it also leads to self-appraisal gaps, limiting their ability to accurately evaluate the fairness of their behaviors. The promising implication of these and other similar findings on self-regulation is that freeing those regulatory resources and bringing agents' attention to self-appraisal gaps could help agents improve and enhance justice enactment. As discussed previously, in a study on context of organizational change (i.e., mergers and acquisitions), Monin et al. (2013) illustrated how agents use different distribution criteria based on their organization's need to encourage morale or promote competition. Their study has a predecessor that assessed the contextual role of organizational morale on justice enactment. In one of the seminal studies on antecedents of distributive justice enactment, Elliott and Meeker (1986) observed that participants adhered to classic principles of distributive justice by making allocation decisions based on merit, equality, or need (Adams, 1965; Homans, 1961; Leventhal, 1976). Specifically, they allocated significantly more money to group members who contributed more to a task and to the group members who were in greater need of money. However, these decisions were moderated by characteristics of the group in such a way that participants were more likely to allocate money to group members who contributed more if the group failed at its task and if group morale was low. Finally, Valentine (2018) brought scholars' attention to the role of organizational context by focusing on other employees in temporary work teams (i.e., those who do not necessarily have an active justice-based relationship with agents and targets). Specifically, this work demonstrates that other employees' cheating behaviors impact a justice agent's ability to act in a fair manner. She also expands our organizational justice vocabulary by coining the term justice enforceability, which refers to the ability to enact justice in light of others' exploitation or abuse of justice rules. She speculates that a way to ameliorate this pesky problem might be to work on implementation of justice safeguards aimed at making the work assignments as transparent as possible. 2.2.9. Summary Reflecting on these articles as individual contributions and as pieces of a larger model, a few notable phenomena emerge. First, because work demands and justice enactment can be costly and can have both depleting and replenishing consequences on agents' self-regulatory resources (Johnson et al., 2014), some agents will be more successful than others at enacting justice and handling those competing demands. Agents who have high dispositional empathy, self-control, and self-regulation abilities tend to be more likely to enact justice in general and they tend to be better at weathering various demands of their work. Second, the observed trickleup influences suggest that justice is of relational and instrumental interest to both employees and agents, thus aligning with and extending the relational justice theories (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992). Specifically, agents do not enact justice uniformly, but they perhaps do so more eagerly for those employees perceived to offer some professional value to them. Finally, through the function of implicit learning processes, agents' own supervisory experiences impact agents' justice enactment, shape their expectations, and further impact the target. These effects, however, could be subtle and could operate outside of the agent's own awareness (Zdaniuk & Bobocel, 2013). 3. Agents of justice: Discussion and path forward After trailing behind the consequences-focused vantage point, we can conclude that our understanding of justice has been enriched through its enhanced empirical focus on the agent in the last decade. Synthesizing what is now a substantial body of research on this topic allowed us to identify important patterns in this literature and draw broad conclusions about the state of the field. We are confident that this new stream of research that emphasizes and simultaneously considers agents, targets, and their environment will provide valuable insights in the future and help agents create more harmonious work environments. We award the rest of our article to discussing the implications of emerging theoretical contributions from our review and highlighting the unique open lines of inquiry. 3.1. Justice enactment and its underlying motives Our review gently suggests that enactment of justice can be best understood as a function of agents' motives and the individual (i.e., agent characteristics), social (i.e., trickle-down influences and upward influences), and contextual factors that impact agents' behaviors and motives. The frameworks upon which the recent justice enactment articles are based are impressive and the wide range of inquiry highlights the importance of studying enactment as a set of complex and intertwined phenomena. For example, the hypotheses across the articles in our review are driven by trickle-down effects of justice; theories of social exchange, reciprocity, and social learning (Ambrose et al., 2013; Masterson, 2001; van Houwelingen et al., 2017; Wo et al., 2015); cognitive processes (e.g., Huang et al., 2017; Scott et al., 2009; Zdaniuk & Bobocel, 2013); self-regulation (Whiteside & Barclay, 2018); belongingness and relational models of human behavior (e.g., Bernerth et al., 2016; Cornelis et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2015); among many others. Despite the theoretical richness of the justice enactment literature, the present review also points to trends and gaps that inform important future directions to move the literature forward. For instance, some studies examined target belongingness motives in agents' justice enactment (Cornelis et al., 2012; Cornelis et al., 2013; Hoogervorst et al., 2013) but these could potentially appeal in equal ways to agents' belongingness and relational motives. This raises the question as to whether the justice enactment literature has really addressed agents' relational motives thus far. In fact, agents may want to invest in adhering to procedural justice across all employees or strategically adhere to the equality rule in distributing rewards to establish a positive group atmosphere. Agents' need to belong can also be expected to influence the kind of justice enactment they prioritize in order to create or maintain psychological closeness between themselves and the members of their team individually and/or collectively. 15

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Another striking gap in justice enactment research is that agents' instrumental motives, often in conjunction with others, have received far more attention than their relational and deontological counterparts. While this focus on agent instrumental motives may fit with a parallel evolution in other literatures that are concerned with understanding the psychology of power (Galinsky, Magee, Inesi, & Gruenfeld, 2006), this does not necessarily mean that instrumental reasons are also dominant drivers of agents' self-regulatory efforts in adhering to or violating justice principles. It just means that they are the ones that are most frequently studied. In fact, the justice perception literature initially focused on recipients' instrumental motives of justice perceptions, and only in a later stage began to understand how relational and deontic motives informed us of antecedents to fairness perceptions (see Colquitt et al., 2001). Thus, the prevalence and impact of the different motives in agents' self-regulation towards justice enactment still remains to be systematically tested. Concerning the deontic motive, the existing literature is a bit ambiguous. On the one hand, dispositional moral identity positively affects procedural justice enactment (Brebels et al., 2011). However, other findings suggest that deontic motives or enacting justice for the sake of justice are the weakest factors that impact agents' enactment of justice (Scott et al., 2014). Therefore, future research can award additional attention to contexts in which an agent's moral identity or value-expression (Qin et al., 2017) is sufficient or even crucial to enact justice despite the potential competing demands they face. 3.2. Justice enactment as a shared responsibility One of the strongest conclusions emerging form our review is that when assessing justice enactment from a theoretical or practical perspective, it is not constructive to view targets as passive consumers of their agents' treatment. Instead, targets themselves carry far greater weight than we initially anticipated. This influence is evident from the absence of the role of targets in earlier theorizing of enactment and by the strength of upward influences summarized in our review. This body of findings allows us to highlight the utility of social exchange theory in justice (Blau, 1964). It also allows us to amplify the earlier voices arguing that justice enactment may involve an element of reciprocity between agents and targets, and that agents' justice enactment may in large part depend on the targets themselves (Korsgaard et al., 1998; Oc et al., 2015; Zapata et al., 2013). Therefore, in addition to placing clear onus on organizations and agents to enact justice, it is crucial to also recognize that targets have the agency to shape the justice enactment from their agents as well. This conclusion comports with the broader victim precipitation (Aquino & Thau, 2008) and followership-leadership literature (Avolio, 2007; Tepper, Duffy, & Breaux-Soignet, 2012) that suggests that employees may elicit specific treatment from their supervisors. Our conclusions also comport with newer commentaries that have effectively challenged the field's reliance on targets when understanding justice (Rupp, Shapiro, Folger, Skarlicki, & Shao, 2017; Thornton-Lugo & Munjal, 2018). After all, we know that justice perceptions are often in the eyes of the beholder (Colquitt et al., 2018) and that those perceptions can result from motivated cognition (Barclay, Bashshur, & Fortin, 2017). Given this line of research and our explanation of how agents reward targets who can help them achieve their goals, we can further appreciate targets' active roles and argue that justice should be viewed as a reflection of nuanced and often complex interactions between perhaps well-meaning, yet sometimes distracted humans. 3.3. Justice enactment and agents' and targets' vocational development An important area for future research is exploring how justice enactment allows agents to shape their own vocations. Super (1980) defines careers through the various roles individuals play throughout their lives. Arguably, in any of these roles, an individual has the opportunity to enact justice, particularly interactional justice (e.g., to coworkers, customers, supervisors, etc.). As the structure of the workforce has become less rigid and workers are becoming more flexible about adapting to different jobs (Sullivan & Baruch, 2009), there is a rising tendency of employees to negotiate, navigate, and influence their work environments, relationships, and developmental career opportunities (Huang et al., 2017). Further, as our review has summarized, individuals have more leverage and ability to influence their roles through eliciting justice enactment from others. Because the research reviewed above indicates that justice enactment has ripple effects for not only the targets of justice but also the agents, justice enactment will likely have important effects on how agents view and shape their roles. A crucial task for future research concerns exploring how justice enactment affects agents' careers in the short and long term. Despite the obvious importance of this question, our review indicates that our knowledge about this matter is virtually non-existent. As fair treatment holds a variety of benefits for those on the receiving end (Colquitt et al., 2013), it would make sense that those who enact fair treatment should be rewarded for it as well, since their enactment of fairness comes with a variety of benefits for the organization, such as increased performance of targeted employees (e.g., Colquitt et al., 2013; Rupp et al., 2017). However, whether justice enactment indeed results in tangible career outcomes remains unclear. Does justice enactment have a positive influence on agents' own performance appraisals? What about its salary implications and its influence on agents' career prospects? Given that some aspects of justice enactment (e.g., listening to employees' opinions, gathering information and verifying its accuracy, and informing employees about upcoming changes) require a considerable amount of time and cognitive resources, justice enactment might come at the expense of complying with the other duties that agents have and thus hinder their overall performance (also see Luthans, 1988; Wiesenfeld, Rothman, Wheeler-Smith, & Galinsky, 2011). Apart from Johnson et al. (2014), who revealed that justice enactment indeed affects agents' extra-role behavior the next day, we know surprisingly little about this matter to date. We remain cautious about the benefits of advising organizations to incentivize justice enactment in their organizations, as such practice might eliminate the moral propriety that justice brings to the organizational life. Another area that can potentially inspire future research on this matter is the literature on OCBs (see Hoffman, Blair, Meriac, & 16

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Woehr, 2007 for a review). Like justice enactment, OCBs are mostly considered desirable acts that benefit others, yet also require the allocation of time (Bergeron, 2007). While multiple studies show that engaging in OCBs results in better performance appraisals (Podsakoff, Whiting, Podsakoff, & Blume, 2008), recent findings suggest that engaging in too many OCBs actually backfires as it hinders employees' task performance (Rubin, Dierdorff, & Bachrach, 2012). Bergeron, Shipp, Rosen, and Furst (2013) showed that time spent on task performance is valued more strongly than time spent on OCBs (in terms of performance evaluations, salary increases, and career advancement). Moreover, when controlling for time spent on task performance, the time employees spent on OCBs is even related negatively to their career advancement and salary increases (Bergeron et al., 2013). Despite the obvious parallels between justice enactment and OCB (i.e., they both require the allocation of time that cannot be devoted to other aspects of the job), it would be beneficial to explore which aspects of justice enactment are considered in-role versus extra-role behavior, and whether this affects the way justice enactment is appreciated by higher-level management. We thus hope that future research on justice enactment is energized by these insights and awards sufficient attention to investigating whether or when justice enactment benefits an agent's career (e.g., in terms of salary increases, career advancement). Are there agent characteristics that influence the relationship between justice enactment and the vocational outcomes of the agent (e.g., time management skills that allow agents to balance their justice enactment with their other obligations; Rapp, Bachrach, & Rapp, 2013)? Further, does the strength of this relationship depend on the type of justice that is enacted (i.e., distributive, procedural, interpersonal or informational)? Another area that might be helpful in unraveling the career implications of justice enactment is the theorizing on implicit leadership. Implicit Leadership Theory (Schyns & Riggio, 2016a; ILT; Schyns & Riggio, 2016b) has mainly been used to explain how employees' implicit schemas about leadership shape the expectations they have for their leaders and how they evaluate their behavior. Similar to employees, higher-level managers likely have specific assumptions and expectations about how lower-level leaders should behave when it comes to justice enactment. Given that such implicit schemas about leadership influence leadership evaluations (Epitropaki & Martin, 2005), it is likely that higher-level management's preconceptions will affect how justice enactment is received and evaluated. A recent study of Caleo (2016) provides some initial support for this line of thought as she revealed that agents' violations of justice rules are evaluated differently depending on whether the agent is male or female. This suggests that varying stereotypes are likely to affect how justice enactment is evaluated and rewarded within organizations. This, in turn, is vastly important as agents are likely to mold their behavior according to the expectations held within the organization. The recent work of Sherf et al. (in press) on the interplay between perceived workload and rewards provides some initial support for this reasoning. We thus encourage future research to award more attention to this matter. 3.4. Justice enactment and agents' well-being Another area that warrants further investigation concerns the impact of justice enactment on agents' well-being. As the overarching leadership literature has been dominated by a focus on how a leader's actions affect employees, it should not come as a surprise that a similar discourse can be found in the justice literature (Scott et al., 2009). A crucial task for future research lies in discovering how the enactment of justice affects agents' own well-being, both in the long-term and in the short-term. Enacting interpersonal justice (Johnson et al., 2014) or fostering a climate of high interpersonal justice is replenishing (Bernerth et al., 2016) and has potential to be a rather positive force in agents' lives. This suggests a clear alignment between the short- and long-term consequences of interpersonal justice enactment for agents, respectively. However, procedural justice enactment seems to come at a cost for agents in the short run (i.e., next day depletion; Johnson et al., 2014), but brings benefits in the long run (i.e., increased occupational satisfaction and less emotional exhaustion). Such insights not only greatly advance the literature on justice enactment, but they are also of great practical value as they can allow agents to take a more deliberate approach to justice enactment. In other words, they will need to balance their current state of mind and energy level against the short and long-term consequences of justice enactment. While some studies have detailed the impact of interpersonal and procedural justice enactment on agents themselves, we are unaware of any studies that have investigated the influence of distributive and informational justice enactment on these agents. Though it could be argued that agents might have little discretion to enact distributive justice (Scott et al., 2009), past research does confirm that agents' motives do influence distributive justice enactment (Scott et al., 2014), meaning it could also influence their own well-being. We believe future research should try to unravel these implications. Is the influence of distributive justice enactment on agents' well-being rather limited as agents have little discretion over it? Alternatively, does distributive justice enactment have a profound influence on agents' well-being as it requires additional effort from them to enact distributive justice, exactly because of the limited discretion they hold over it? Relatedly, though agents often have high discretion over their enactment of informational justice, it seems plausible that the enactment of informational justice on the agents themselves will vary as a function of the valence of the message. After all, people are more reluctant to communicate bad news (Margolis & Molinsky, 2008) and more eager to communicate good news (Dibble & Levine, 2010). Another direction for future research involves investigating whether the impact of justice enactment on agents varies as a function of agent characteristics as well as the context in which justice enactment occurs. At the very least, it seems plausible that other agent characteristics affect how agents respond to their own enactment of justice. For example, given that conscientious individuals are more bound to fulfill moral obligations and set high standards for themselves (see Hogan & Ones, 1997), they might be more vulnerable to suffering when they fail to enact justice. Similarly, whether agents enact justice or not is likely to have a differential impact on the agent depending on the specific situation they face. Research has shown that supervisors who engage in abusive supervision experience increased recovery the next day, but mainly when they face high, rather than low, job demands (Qin et al., 2018). We expect that the context in which justice enactment occurs will have a similar influence on the consequences agents face 17

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when they enact justice. This, again, showcases the many, interesting avenues that future research can explore to advance our understanding of justice enactment. 3.5. Justice enactment and cultural differences Most of the justice enactment articles that we identified drew their conclusions based on samples from North America and Western Europe and only a few ventured beyond those Western cultures (Aryee et al., 2007; Huang et al., 2017; Qin et al., 2017; Reb et al., 2018; Schuh et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2015). Given the rates of immigration into Western countries and the influx of refugees into Western European countries (Newman, Bimrose, Nielsen, & Zacher, 2018), chances are that employees will, at some point, find themselves working with Colleagues from vastly different cultural backgrounds. Interesting implications emerge from considering that many employees might essentially internalize multiple cultural identities and their behaviors might be influenced by their local norms, native culture customs, or even their global identities (e.g., Erez et al., 2013; Thoits, 2003). Given that what is fair is, in part, based upon what is expected (Bos, Vermunt, & Wilke, 1996), and what is expected is acquired from cultural surroundings (Shapiro & Sherf, 2015), pursuing this line of research can help us address a wide range of relevant justice enactment topics. Among other topics, we can explore how national culture affects the manner in which justice agents decide what is fair, how agents treat targets with internalized norms that are different from their own, how national culture implicitly guides agents' justice behaviors, and which contextual factors guide agents towards acting in a way that is synchronous with their host or native culture. This line of inquiry has interesting implications for our understanding of local norms and their alignment with traditionally Western principles of justice (e.g., Liu et al., 2017). Past research on justice perceptions has shown that employees' perceptions of justice and reactions to injustice vary as a function of cultural dimensions (Brockner et al., 2001; Shao, Rupp, Skarlicki, & Jones, 2011; Summereder, Streicher, & Batinic, 2013). Just like targets, agents are likely to be affected by such similar cultural influences when it comes to justice enactment. Assessing the impact of culture as one such element that is embedded within individual, relational, and contextual factors has the potential to yield a particularly fruitful and highly creative line of work. Drawing from existing acculturation research (Berry, 2008, 2009) may also prove to be useful in addressing these topics. Likewise, integrating justice enactment with existing theory and research on individual employees' experienced fit, job satisfaction, overall career adjustment, and work stress seems to be a promising way to provide needed perspectives to improve understanding in vocational interests and behaviors. This is particularly important in the current era of significant global shifts and cultural changes, in which justice enactment could help people craft some much needed stability. 3.6. Justice enactment in culture of harm-avoidance: Lessons from moral psychology We argued that the investigation of justice enactment from a cross-cultural perspective is an area ripe for research. However, a less apparent, yet equally fascinating area for future exploration lies in the changing nature of morality within our own cultures. Societal prioritization of different moral values represents an untapped potential of exploring the conjuncture between justice and morality, and it suggests that research on justice enactment particularly from a deontological perspective is far from reaching its saturation point. This potential is due to one foundational aspect of morality: morality is malleable, subjective, and is subject to change (Haslam, 2016; Rozin, 1999; Schein & Gray, 2018). Therefore, as justice is unquestionably intertwined with morality, we can view justice as being pegged to morality like a currency; the two will continue to co-exist together and move in tandem. The implication of this interplay is that societies might find themselves in positions of changing ideologies in which one aspect of morality is temporarily prioritized over the other. Scholars of morality argue that there is evidence that Western cultures, particularly North America, are starting to prioritize harm-avoidance (Campbell & Manning, 2014, 2018; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018) over fairness or other facets of morality (i.e., the moral foundations; Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009). In harm-avoidance cultures in which safety is a supreme value, various aspects of justice might be deprioritized if they are deemed to jeopardize the emotional or psychological safety of others. Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) label such cultural attitudes as safetysm. While these trends have been acknowledged from a perspective of moral psychology, scholars of justice have largely omitted the influence of those societal trends from theories of justice perceptions, as well as justice enactment (also see Camps, Graso, & Brebels, in press). We encourage our colleagues to take into consideration the importance of the broader societal morality not only when assessing agents' behavior, but also when advancing our understanding of organizational justice itself. 4. Conclusion Going forward, those interested in justice enactment are tasked with continuing to offer practical and scholarly contributions with impact that extends far beyond what is currently known. While reflecting upon the entire state of this literature, its diversity in goals, methodologies, and results derived across different articles, we conclude that the justice enactment literature is up to this challenge. By offering a complement to the previously dominant perspective that agents should behave fairly by following the prescribed tenets of justice, researchers and practitioners can recognize that exhorting fair practices is helpful, but insufficient. Instead, the field would benefit from furthering our understanding of: 1) how instrumental, relational, and deontic motives drive agents' behavior, 2) how targets influence their agents' enactment of justice, and 3) how enacting justice can present challenges, as well as benefits for the agents themselves. By enthusiastically embracing these newer streams of research, we can perhaps come closer to truly viewing justice as a “story about what people want from their work lives and what they fear, a story about how organizations and the people who populate them function and think, a story that could give us a remarkable perspective on issues far beyond justice itself” (Lind, 18

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2001, p. 225). Appendix A. Review methodology In order to ensure that the synthesis is comprehensive, timely, and most importantly, that it will help future research to contribute to a better collective understanding of employee work attitudes and adjustments, we have conducted a thorough and organized review of the core principles of interest, guided by our scope specified in section 1.1. Studies examining antecedents and consequences of justice enactment have used a variety of terminologies to refer to this phenomenon, such as justice rule adherence (Scott et al., 2014), justice rule compliance (Huang et al., 2017), fairness enactment (van Houwelingen et al., 2017), or justice as a dependent variable, although this term can also be inclusive of general antecedents to justice, as well as justice enactment (Brockner et al., 2015; Scott et al., 2007). Furthermore, principles of enactment that are of interest to us are also often found under individual facets (i.e., distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice enactment). Finally, we assessed sub-facets of justice by searching for terms such as accuracy, respect, and voice. Because some of the sub-facets have received attention independently of justice (e.g., Grover, 2013), we included only those articles when they could inform us of agent-based justice enactment. Keeping these theoretical issues in mind, we conducted a broad search using the following keywords groups: 1) justice/fairness enactment, rule adherence, rule violation, rule compliance or behavior; 2) justice/fairness agent, justice/fairness actor; 3) justice/ fairness as a dependent variable; 4) antecedents, causes, adherence of justice or fairness; and 5) overall, distributive, procedural, interpersonal or informational justice/fairness. We initially relied on Google Scholar in order to identify articles with methodology, research questions, and scope that align with ours. We cross-checked those results against Business Source Complete and PsycInfo databases, hosted through a library at a research-intensive university. Next, we extended our search beyond the keywords. We noticed that occasionally articles that focus on what we term justice enactment do not always use common key words. Yet, upon a closer look, they very clearly meet our criteria of inclusion (i.e., they focus on agent treatment of targets according to established justice principles). Researchers might also tailor their nomenclature to their own unique questions that have yet to receive attention and they draw further delineations around their own constructs. For example, Valentine (2018) introduces the idea of justice enforceability, which she defines as employees' perceptions that authorities will be able to act in a fair manner, particularly given the possibility of others cheating and impacting the justice agents' behavior. We located these other newer contributions by looking at articles that are grounded upon the seminal pieces on justice enactment (Brockner et al., 2015; Scott et al., 2007; Scott et al., 2009; Scott et al., 2014). Finally, we informally inquired within our own professional network by reaching out to renowned scholars to confirm that the list of articles we chose for our review is indeed, comprehensive, reliable, and definitive at this point in time. We identified 44 articles that clearly focus on agent perspective, and we use this body of literature to guide our review. We summarized these articles in Table 1. References Adams, J. S. (1965). Inequity in social exchange. In Berkowitz (Ed.). 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