THE CONSISTENCY RULE AND THE VOICE EFFECT - THE INFLUENCE OF EXPECTATIONS ON PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS JUDGMENTS AND PERFORMANCE

In procedural justice research it has frequently been found that allow ing people an opportunity to voice their opinion enhances their judgem ents of the fairness of a decision-making procedure. The present study investigated how this voice effect is affected by the consistency ove r time rule, which dictates that, once people expect a certain procedu re, deviation from the expected procedure will lead to a reduction in procedural fairness. Two experiments were conducted. In both experimen ts the independent variables manipulated were whether subjects were ex plicitly told to expect a voice procedure, were explicitly told to exp ect a no-voice procedure, or were told nothing about a subsequent proc edure, and whether or not subjects subsequently received an opportunit y to voice their opinion. The manipulations were induced by means of s cenarios in Experiment 1, and by means of the Lind, Kanfer and Early ( 1990) paradigm in Experiment 2. In both experiments it was found that subjects who expected a voice procedure or who expected nothing judged receiving the voice procedure as more fair than receiving the no-voic e procedure, but that subjects who expected a no-voice procedure judge d receiving the voice procedure (inconsistency) as less fair than rece iving the no-voice procedure (consistency), Furthermore, effects of th e manipulated variables on subjects' task performance were found in Ex periment 2.