How and why terrorism corrupts the consistency principle of organizational justice

We examined the impact of terrorism on the administration of organizational justice. Based on Terror Management Theory (TMT), it was hypothesized that punishment of deviance would change following an act of terrorism. Specifically, deviant individuals who committed an act high in moral severity would receive more extreme punishment after a terrorist attack than they would have received prior to this incident—thereby compromising consistency in the punishment of deviance, which many organizations seek to maintain. We tested this premise by examining archival punishment data before and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The organization we chose was charged with the consistent dispensation of justice and legally constrained in the severity of punishment it could assess—thereby providing a conservative test of our hypotheses. All predictions were supported.