The impact of procedural and distributive justice on satisfaction and manufacturing performance: a replication of Lindquist (1995) with a focus on the importance of common metrics in experimental design

Abstract

AbstractThis paper replicates Lindquist’s (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995) seminal research introducing the concepts of justice to the accounting literature. We use organizational justice theory, as did he, to replicate his study and, in doing so, question some findings of partial replications and extensions done over the past 25 years. We do this because work built off his study has challenged some of his findings. These challenges, we believe, have resulted from most researchers using different research metrics than did Lindquist. Many of these extensions have also used a mental-based task, instead of a manual-based one, in their experiments. We believe this constrains the ability to draw inferences and conclusions from this subsequent research. We further believe this constraint extends to much of the experimental research in the social sciences.In our research we replicate exactly Lindquist’s (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995) operationalizations of voice and vote and measure dependent outcomes for four of the same conditions he investigated. In contrast to most of other follow-up studies, we find, as did Lindquist, that having a voice only leads to significantly enhanced satisfaction with high-stretch targets, as compared to having a vote only or no input. We also corroborate Lindquist’s (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995) result that having a voice only leads to significantly greater satisfaction with the experimental task, as compared to participants with a vote only or no input. Additionally, unlike Lindquist (Lindquist, Journal of Management Accounting Research 7:122–147, 1995), we find participants allowed only a voice significantly outperform participants with a vote only and no input. We thus support Lindquist’s findings of a fair process effect for voice and perceptions of pseudo-participation related to vote.