K. Vandenbos et al., THE CONSISTENCY RULE AND THE VOICE EFFECT - THE INFLUENCE OF EXPECTATIONS ON PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS JUDGMENTS AND PERFORMANCE, European journal of social psychology, 26(3), 1996, pp. 411-428
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.