Deontic Justice and Organizational Neuroscience

Russell S. Cropanzano (), Sebastiano Massaro () and William J. Becker ()
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Russell S. Cropanzano: University of Colorado at Boulder
Sebastiano Massaro: University of Warwick
William J. Becker: Texas Christian University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2017, vol. 144, issue 4, No 5, 733-754

Abstract: Abstract According to deontic justice theory, individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice. That is, standards of justice can be valued for their own sake, even apart from serving self-interested goals. While a growing body of evidence in business ethics supports the notion of deontic justice, skepticism remains. This hesitation results, at least in part, from the absence of a coherent framework for explaining how individuals produce and experience deontic justice. To address this need, we argue that a compelling, yet still missing, step is to gain further understanding into the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of deontic justice. Here, we advance a theoretical model that disentangles three key processes of deontic justice: The use of justice rules to assess events, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy. Together with reviewing neural systems supporting these processes, broader implications of our model for business ethics scholarship are discussed.

Keywords: Affect and cognition; Deonance; Deontic justice; Empathy; Organizational justice; Workplace fairness; Organizational neuroscience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3056-3

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