Why It's So Hard to Be Fair

"Why It's so hard to be fair" is an article written by Joel Brockner and was published in the Harvard Business Review March 1, 2006. In this article, Professor Brockner analyzed the benefits of process fairness, when and where company applies it as a performance booster. However, he also made a question that process fairness has many advantages but why everybody doesn't use it. In the end, he gave advice to companies of how to make process fairness the norm.

Starting with the downsizing problem in two companies, the article comes with showing obviously the effectiveness of process fairness not only in reducing cost but also in increasing employees' performance. Company A which spent significant amounts of money providing a safety net for its laid off workers but it didn't handle the process well. On the other hand, company B's senior managers explained the strategic purpose of the layoffs many times before its implementation and their performance was better than they had been before the layoffs occurred. The reason is that employees in company B felt respected and treated fairly. According to "A Model of Fair Process and Its Limits" (Wu, Y., C.H, Loch and L, Van der Heyden., 2008) some researches of fair process shows that people care not only the outcome but also the process that create these outcomes. In general, employees - themselves decide a decision has been made fairly or not. Besides, if a process wants to be fair, it must have three drivers: how much input employees believe they have in the decision making process; how employees believe decisions are made and implemented and how managers behave. It can be seen that, applying process fairness will help a company to reducing legal costs by cutting down on employee theft and turnover; and still to have more satisfied employees. Furthermore, fair process also increases value, inspires operational managers to carry out a strategy eagerly and embraces an organizational change. Also, this process can be applied and has a compelling result in customer relationship. The impact from customers who are involved in the process fairness culture and how customer involvement or sometimes an apology can limit the amount of impact a bad situation could cause. However, the question is: why doesn't everybody use it? This is also the main purpose of the article - it showed the lack of attention given to "Process Fairness" by most companies. Actually, some managers wrongly believe that tangible resources are always more meaningful to employees than being treated fairly. In addition, process fairness's benefits are not obvious to some executives and it can weaken their power. The last reason is the desire to avoid uncomfortable situations. In the final part of this article, Professor Brockner advises companies to take some steps to make fair process such as addressing the knowledge gap, investing in training and making fair process a top priority.

In this article, professor Brockner presented a great argument for the use of fair process by analyzing and providing numerous of evident examples, surveys, studies and his own experiences. In each part of article, the author gave data and research that are suitable for the part's topic. For example, when he mentioned fair process as a performance booster, he used his experience when he worked with a CEO of a financial services institution. After CEO and senior executives had several town hall meetings and holding informal focus groups with the organizational managers, the organizational managers felt respected - that meant they show process fairness. The author divided his article into five parts and each part has its own topic so the author's interpretation and representation