Strategic Management Journal  
Issue Date:  1998 (Vol. 19)    
Pages: 323-338

Editor's Choice.   
Collective knowledge building is a key strategic task for firms' success today.  But, creating and sharing knowledge are intangible activities that can neither be supervised nor forced out of people.  They happen only when individuals cooperate voluntarily.  A key challenge facing strategic management is obtaining the voluntary cooperation of individuals as firms formulate and implement their strategic decisions.  This essay draws on the rich body of procedural justice research to address this critical issue.  The authors argue that when people feel their strategic decision-making processes are fair, they display a high level of voluntary cooperation based on their attitudes of trust and commitment.   Conversely, when people feel that the processes are unfair, they refuse to cooperate by hoarding ideas and dragging their feet in conceiving and executing strategic decisions.  The authors further develop this argument into team performance wherein the attitudinal and behavioral effects of procedural justice are corroborated with theory and initial evidence of their bottom-line performance consequences.  They then build a theory, what they call intellectual and emotional recognition theory, that can explain why procedural justice invokes the side of human behavior that goes beyond outcome-driven self-interests and that is so critical in the knowledge economy.

Strategic Management Journal  
Issue Date:  1991 (Vol. 12)    
Pages: 125-143

While work in the field of global strategic management has largely focused on defining the content of effective global strategies and on prescribing winning strategic moves for multinationals, this research argues the importance of the process through which global strategies are generated, in particular the perceived procedural justice of that process.  Drawing on the theoretical heritage of justice-based research, this study first explored the meaning of procedural justice by an investigation of the specific criteria used by subsidiary top managers to define what they perceive to be a fair process in global strategy-making.  Second, the importance of procedural justice was assessed by an examination of its effects on the higher-order attitudes of commitment, trust, and social harmony as well as on the lower-order attitude of outcome satisfaction in subsidiary top management.  One of the central conclusions of the research is that the procedural justice of the global strategy generation process indeed affects commitment, trust, and social harmony as well as outcome satisfaction in subsidiary top management, and hence provides a potentially powerful but, as yet, unexplored avenue for mobilizing the multinational's global network of subsidiaries.