Why Its so Hard to Be Fair

Employees are very observant and often watch their managements every move. As a manager, it is important to treat all employees equally and consider their needs when making decisions about the business. Management who sets unequal objectives or fails to recognize the positive efforts or performance of one employee and praises others who are not accomplishing the same quality creates a very unstable working atmosphere and respect and trust will be forfeited.

The topic of “Affirmative Action” policy, placed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, introduced the program to reduce discriminatory acts towards “underrepresented and minority groups, which required and ensured any applicant are employed—without regards to race, creed, color, or national origin (663).” In Richard Rodriquez article “None of This Is Fair,” published in 2007, he tells his own account of discrimination as a student. Rodriguez attended Stanford, Columbia, and the University of Berkley during the “Affirmative Action” period. Being of Mexican-American heritage, Rodriguez writes in great detail about his struggles, emotionally and mentally, throughout his collegiate years. Rodriguez’ main argument is all individual rights,

All employees analyze their environment and strive to be recognized and rewarded for their hard work and dedication they put into the company, in a word they are seeking justice. Justice can be defined as a person receiving what they feel they are entitled to and if they do not receive what they deserve, the situation may boarder on injustice. Unfortunately in today’s society justice and appreciation are not given out to all those deserving (Pinder, 1998). Within the Equity theory there are three justice theories. The first of which is distributive justice, this touches on if the referent feels that the outputs are fair that are given to the employees. This comes into play

Rather, Equity, and the sense of fairness which commonly underpins motivation, is dependent on the comparison a person makes between his or her reward/investment ratio with the ratio enjoyed (or suffered) by others considered to be in a similar situation”(Balancing Employee Inputs and Outputs).

Business environments today display diversity, a numerical composition that reflects different kinds of people, such as men and women of different ethnic origins, educational experiences, and professional backgrounds (Beamish, Morrison, Inkpen, & Rosenzweig, 2003). A vast amount of organizations are emulating a diverse workforce. Fair treatment of employees is the responsibility of the human resource management team within a firm. Footsteps of past generations are the facilitating mechanism allowing today’s generation to participate in a safe and fair workplace. Specific rules and regulations assist in equal employment opportunities for every employee. The Equal Employment

Employers are required to treat all employees equally and give equal opportunity to all employees when considering performance management criteria. The employers should not have pre-judged views or biased views when approaching excellent or poor performing employees.

Procedural justice is determined on the basis of the quality of what is being communicated an employee. In other words, procedural justice is based on the extent to which an employee feels whether his employer communicated crucial decisions in a sensitive and ethical manner (Harvey & Haines III, 2005). In other words, how a decision is made and communicated is what counts most (Harvey & Haines III, 2005). Unfortunately, Reed’s behavior implied that he regarded Fred as someone worthy of respect. This was further attested when Reed felt that it was not important to let Fred know the dates when he saw Fred’s company car parked in his driveway during work hours. Moreover, the new performance evaluation system implemented by Reed showed that Fred was doing “very good”. However, Reed decided to focus more on the least desirable component of Fred’s evaluation and give Fred and overall “good”. The results of the evaluation were humiliating for Fred as it was his lowest ever rating and was certainly lower than all other new hires who were at least 20 years younger to him. The assigned case study does not tell us how exactly Reed communicated his evaluations of Fred’s performance to Fred, but it does tell us that he evaluated Fred the very same way the second time. This time he sent Fred a memo letting him know that he was capable of doing better. The procedures involved in decision-making and the method of communication used affect employee behavior at

Helping performance raters avoid bias is an important factor in creating a legally sound performance management system (Aguinis, 2013). All people leaders will be required to attend yearly and bi-yearly training to help manage the performance of employees. They will also be required to justify their ratings to their direct leader. Once the leader approves the rating, the performance review will be made available to the employee. The employee will be able to leave feedback and sign the performance review. Once signatures have been received the performance review will not be

Apparently, the higher priority is already given at the lower levels. If this were false, then there would be no approach to organize a national unionized workforce.In conclusion, the fair thing to implement is a collective negotiation or bargaining. Fairness is a commonly missing subject when handling labor disputes. But, the entire process should be fair across the board. Evidently, local and national unions are likely to feel like they have the upper hand; ability to prioritize their needs, but that is just their opinion.subject when handling labor disputes. But, the entire process should be fair across the board. Evidently, local and national unions are likely to feel like they have the upper hand; ability to prioritize their needs, but that is just their

(1) Quantitative Concept of Fairness: Under this concept, thequantity of time or effort one puts into a task should determine the reward one receives from it. Those who expend more time and effort should get more than those who expend less time and effort. This is certainly a legitimate concept of fairness in some situations. (Mark W. Foreman. Prelude to Philosophy: Thinking Critically About Foundational Beliefs. 2012)

Members of the board can also implement fair affirmative action policies to avoid preferential treatment shown between unprotected classes of individuals, which may result in reverse discrimination occurrences. Many people argue that affirmative action sometimes do the opposite of what it was created to do, by placing too much emphasis on race resulting in one group of people being preferred over another group of individuals. However, affirmative action was designed to create equality in the workplace and by neglecting the needs of Caucasian individuals that are not a part of the protected class, would be going against the very purpose of affirmative action. Our company will ensure that this does not occur by using an effective system to make sure that all members of the company are treated fairly and that by implementing affirmative action policies, we do not neglect the needs of unprotected classes of individuals.

Fairness Principle. It is based on the belief that stakeholders who have a vested interest in the firm should be treated fairly. There are four types of fairness: reciprocal fairness, distributive fairness, fair competition and procedural fairness. Reciprocal fairness addresses the issues of treating another party fairly and having the other party treat the firm fairly. Distributive fairness is based on the assumption that the allocation of finite resources within the firm will be distributed fairly based on maximizing the benefits of those allocations. Fair competition focuses on the fair treatment given by the firm as it interacts with its existing and potential competitors, Procedural fairness deals with ensuring that parties that interact with the firm are treated fairly from a due process perspective.

The equity theory conceived by J. Stacy Adams is based premise that "people gauge the fairness of their work outcomes relative to others, any perceived inequity is a motivating state of mind" (Schermerhorn, Hunt, and Osborn, 2005, p.10, chpt.6). This theory when applied to a sales force would not be the best method to motivate this employee group as to what is deemed fair by a team leader could be perceived as unfair by the

After reading the case analysis Equity in Academia a few things were made apparent to me, it is clearly obvious that professor Melinda Wilkerson is over whelmed with the amount of student papers, journals and recommendations forms that need to be graded and filled out. She finds it difficult to find any personal time for herself due to the heavy workload and is feeling frustrated about the fact that her paycheck was smaller but her hours were longer. She learns that her colleague Ron Ague was able to reduce his work load in order to give talks to groups around the states which contributed to the scholarly journals he would submit to the university which solidified him as a valuable asset to the human resource committee. Melinda is discouraged about the fact she was not made aware that professors had the option of course reduction which would have assisted her greatly with the overwhelming workload she is currently dealing with, Melinda was even more distraught to learn that Ron would be making almost a thousand dollars more than her the following year due to all the contributions he found time to make as a result of his course reductions. Melinda is feeling over worked and undervalued by the university due to the circumstance I have just stated.

The organizational justice (OB, p. 256) is taken to extremes. Implementing the same reward through the company notwithstanding local market and standard of living, notwithstanding individual performance creates the feeling of inequity and does not encourage doing better than the average. Attempts to minimize sabotage appear to focus on treating employees fairly and honestly, by