Achieving fairness in the face of competing concerns: The different effects of individual and group characteristics (original) (raw)

1986, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

This study investigates preferences among allocation procedures available for use by those distributing rewards for individual performance in a group effort. Our first hypothesis is that allocators try to balance the payoff distribution in response to all available information about the individual members. We manipulated a target person's level of contribution to the group effort and level of financial need. Results showed a main effect for both individual characteristics, but no interaction between them, thereby supporting our hypothesis of independent additive effects. Second, we argued that group characteristics would serve only to modify the effects of the individual characteristics. We manipulated two group characteristics: morale and task outcome. As predicted, no main effects for either group level variable emerged. Further, the effect of contribution was greater under failure than success and under low than high morale. The effect of need was greater under low morale, but only for female allocators. Consider the challenge facing those responsible for allocating rewards for individual performance in a group effort. Facing a plethora of information about the group and the people comprising it, the allocator's chief concern usually is how to combine this information to devise and justify a distribution procedure that is fair. But disagreements about the relative importance of the available information and the fundamental nature of fairness can make the choice of an allocation scheme difficult. Three general procedures have emerged as the most popular: equity (to each according to input), equality (to each the same), and need (to each according to need).' The purpose of the present article is to examine preferences among allocation schemes. In particular, we base our investigation on the postulate that choices among these schemes are a function of competing concerns, which, in turn, make use of different kinds of information about the group, its members, and its task. Further, we suggest that the choice involves not so much opting exclusively for one distribution procedure, but a synthesis among all of them that comes from a balancing of several concerns. Finally, we present a retraining of the decision process that clarifies the roles of the different kinds of information available and offers a more parsimonious perspective on the search for fairness. To date, most of the research on allocation behavior has focused on the implementation of an equity scheme (e.g., Berkowitz