D. Ramona Bobocel and Aaron C. Farrell University of Waterloo The purpose of Experiment 1 was to examine the relative effect of 2 types of managerial accounts--a causal account, in which the decision maker minimizes personal responsi- bility, and an ideological account, in which the decision maker assumes responsibility and provides a justification--on White male observers' perceptions of interactional fairness following a sex-based promotion decision. Results showed that, compared with either the causal account or a control condition, men perceived significantly more interactional fairness in the ideological account condition. In Experiment 2, the justification and re- sponsibility dimensions that were intentionally confounded in the ideological account in Experiment 1 were separated. Results showed that providing an adequate justification was both necessary and sufficient to influence perceptions of interactional fairness. Managers are often concerned with their image as a fair leader among employees and other organizational con- stituents (Greenberg, 1990a). However, being perceived as a fair leader is becoming particularly challenging in the workplace in light of dwindling resources. For example, because of economic pressures, managers must more of- ten make resource allocation decisions that have undesir- able consequences for employees (e.g., layoffs and budget cutbacks). In the eyes of some individuals, being per- ceived as fair may also be increasingly difficult because of government-legislated affirmative action (AA) programs designed to create equal employment opportunities for members of designated groups. The purpose of the present set of studies was to examine the influence of managerial accounts on White men's per- ceptions of interactional fairness in the context of an AA D. Ramona Bobocel and Aaron C. Farrell, Department of Psy- chology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Management, Dallas, Texas, August 1994. Experiment 1 is based on Aaron C. Far- rell's undergraduate honor's thesis. This project was funded by the Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and by Uni- versity of Waterloo-Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grants 037-7727 and 037-7258. We gratefully acknowledge John Meyer and Sharon Agar for their input on various aspects of the research and Rob Folger, David Kravitz, Richard McCline, and Mark Zanna for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to D. Ramona Bobocel, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G 1. 22 decision.
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Bobocel et al. (1996) studied this question.