Abstract
The Procedural Fairness, Employee Voice, and Justification scale, developed by Joseph P. Daly and Paul D. Geyer (1994), is an established psychometric assessment designed to evaluate organizational justice during large-scale structural change. Originally contextualized around facility relocations across seven distinct corporate environments, this 11-item self-report questionnaire operationalizes the structural, processual, and relational components of organizational decision-making. The instrument comprises three interrelated subscales: Procedural Fairness (4 items), which captures general appraisals of systemic process equity; Employee Voice (4 items), which evaluates process control and the extent to which employees are afforded pre-decisional input; and Justification (3 items), which assesses informational justice and the adequacy of managerial rationale behind consequential organizational actions. Responses are recorded on a standardized 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). Psychometric analyses demonstrate robust internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients of .88 for the procedural fairness subscale and .77 for the combined voice and justification dimensions. Confirmatory structural equation modeling corroborates its construct, convergent, and discriminant validity against distributive fairness, demonstrating that voice and justification act as primary antecedents to overarching procedural fairness evaluations, which sequentially predict organizational commitment and turnover intentions. This scale remains a benchmark tool in industrial and organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management for diagnosing employee perceptions during disruptions, restructurings, and strategic change initiatives.
Keywords
procedural fairness, employee voice, justification, organizational justice, organizational change, informational justice, process control, turnover intentions, industrial and organizational psychology, psychometrics
Authors
The scale was developed and empirically validated by Joseph P. Daly and Paul D. Geyer:
- Joseph P. Daly, Ph.D. — Department of Management, Walker College of Business, Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina, USA. Dr. Daly specializes in organizational behavior, justice theory, leadership dynamics, and managerial ethics.
- Paul D. Geyer, Ph.D. — Industrial and Organizational Psychologist and statistical consultant, whose empirical contributions focus on organizational assessment, psychometrics, survey development, and large-scale organizational development interventions.
Correspondence regarding the foundational study was historically directed via the Department of Management at Appalachian State University or through the publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Procedural Fairness, Employee Voice, and Justification scale is to quantify subjective employee evaluations regarding the equity, transparency, and participative integrity of administrative decision-making processes during major organizational transitions. In organizational settings, disruptions such as departmental downsizings, corporate mergers, technological adoptions, and geographical facility relocations generate acute uncertainty and vulnerability. Although classic economic perspectives assume employee reactions are driven solely by material outcomes (i.e., distributive justice), Daly and Geyer demonstrated that the procedural integrity of the decision-making apparatus serves as a critical buffer against disaffection, moral injury, and voluntary turnover.
From an applied human resource and organizational development standpoint, the instrument fulfills three core diagnostic and research functions:
- Assessing Structural Change Interventions: Organizations undergoing strategic realignment, site closures, or relocations utilize the scale to benchmark workforce sentiment. Tracking these dimensions allows leadership to determine whether resistance stems from unaddressed operational grievances or perceived disenfranchisement.
- Isolating Channels of Process Control: By bifurcating procedural appraisals into broad fairness, actionable voice mechanisms, and narrative justifications, the scale pinpoints specific communication breakdowns. Management can observe whether negative sentiments result from an absence of pre-decisional dialogue (voice deficits) or an absence of transparent logic (justification deficits).
- Predicting Key Organizational Attitudes and Behaviors: Empirically, the scale functions as an antecedent metric in predictive models assessing intention to remain, organizational citizenship behaviors, institutional trust, affective commitment, and post-relocation psychological adjustment.
Psychological Construct
The instrument operationalizes three distinct yet conceptually linked dimensions within organizational justice literature: procedural fairness, employee voice, and managerial justification.
1. Procedural Fairness (Procedural Justice)
Procedural fairness reflects the overarching cognitive and evaluative assessment that the formal mechanisms, rules, and steps governing decision-making are impartial, ethical, unbiased, and equitable. Grounded in the landmark criteria outlined by Leventhal (1980), fair procedures require consistency across persons and time, suppression of self-interest, representativeness, and accurate information usage. Within this scale, procedural fairness captures employees’ holistic evaluation of organizational conduct during significant transitions (e.g., “The steps that the company took to make the relocation decision were fair to me”). Rather than evaluating whether the final outcome favored the employee, this dimension measures whether the systemic journey leading to that outcome was legitimate.
2. Employee Voice (Process Control)
Employee voice captures the degree to which an individual has an active platform to express concerns, propose alternatives, and contribute meaningful input before final institutional decisions are enacted. Drawing heavily from Thibaut and Walker’s (1975) process control model, voice provides individuals with a sense of dignity and psychological agency. It communicates to organizational members that they are valued constituents whose perspectives warrant administrative consideration (e.g., “Before management decided to move, they asked me what I thought about the idea”). In Daly and Geyer’s formulation, voice acts as a vital empirical mechanism underpinning procedural justice judgments.
3. Justification (Informational Justice)
Justification assesses the social and cognitive transparency of leadership, specifically whether management provided comprehensive, timely, candid, and coherent explanations detailing why an organizational action was necessary (e.g., “Management fully explained to me why the company was relocating”). This dimension directly reflects what Bies and Moag (1986) termed informational justice—a vital component of interactional justice. Adequate justifications honor the basic human need for cognitive sensemaking during crises, reducing attributional ambiguity and dampening suspicions of managerial opportunism.
Theoretical Framework
The scale is rooted in organizational justice theory, integrating three prominent frameworks from social psychology and organizational science:
1. The Process Control Model (Thibaut & Walker, 1975)
Originally formulated in legal dispute contexts, Thibaut and Walker established that individuals distinguish between decision control (actual authority to dictate the final verdict) and process control (the opportunity to articulate one’s evidence and perspective prior to the verdict). Even when decision control rests entirely with an authority figure, high process control dramatically elevates subjective fairness evaluations—a psychological phenomenon termed the “fair process effect” or “voice effect.” Daly and Geyer transplanted this paradigm into industrial settings, arguing that while management retains unilateral authority to relocate or restructure, honoring employees’ process control mitigates feelings of powerlessness.
2. Leventhal’s Structural Justice Theory (1980)
Gerald S. Leventhal expanded justice concepts beyond legal procedures into social and organizational settings by defining six structural rules of procedural equity: consistency, bias suppression, accuracy of information, correctability, representativeness, and ethicality. Daly and Geyer’s procedural fairness subscale synthesizes these structural tenets into a parsimonious assessment of administrative decision steps.
3. The Group-Value and Relational Models of Authority (Lind & Tyler, 1988; Tyler & Lind, 1992)
The relational model of authority posits that procedural fairness and managerial justifications convey critical symbolic messages regarding an individual’s status, respect, and standing within a social group. When leaders solicit employee voice and provide rich justifications, they communicate that employees are respected partners rather than expendable capital. Conversely, opaque decisions enacted without voice or justification signal low interpersonal respect, prompting psychological disengagement and withdrawal intentions.
Validity
The psychometric validity of the scale was rigorously evaluated by Daly and Geyer (1994) using a multi-organization field sample comprising employees across seven corporate relocations:
Construct and Discriminant Validity
Daly and Geyer conducted comprehensive structural equation modeling (SEM) to establish whether the target constructs exhibited discriminant validity against distributive fairness. A series of nested confirmatory models revealed that multi-factor formulations separating distributive fairness, procedural fairness, and voice/justification achieved superior fit indices relative to single-factor or alternative constrained models. The empirical distinctness of procedural evaluations from outcome evaluations confirmed that employees meaningfully differentiate between what they received and how the administrative decisions were handled.
Convergent and Criterion-Related Validity
The scale evidenced strong convergent validity through its intercorrelations with theoretically aligned organizational variables:
- Procedural fairness was strongly and positively correlated with intention to remain with the organization (r > .40, p < .001).
- Voice and justification served as significant antecedent predictors of general procedural fairness, explaining substantial portions of variance in overall justice appraisals.
- Structural model path coefficients revealed that procedural fairness directly influenced organizational commitment and mediated the relationship between voice/justification and employee willingness to relocate.
Reliability
The internal consistency of the subscales has been empirically substantiated across multiple industrial contexts:
- Procedural Fairness Subscale: The 4-item procedural fairness measure demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of α = .88 in Daly and Geyer’s (1994) primary validation study, indicating excellent internal consistency and item homogeneity.
- Employee Voice and Justification: The composite voice and justification measure yielded a reliable Cronbach’s alpha of α = .77. Individually, the 4-item voice dimension and the 3-item justification dimension display solid internal consistency across subsequent organizational justice literature, typically spanning between .75 and .84 depending on contextual adaptation.
The presence of reverse-scored items within both the voice and justification blocks mitigated systematic acquiescence response bias without deteriorating scale reliability.
Factor Analysis
In the foundational investigation by Daly and Geyer (1994), empirical dimensionality was examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmed through structural equation modeling:
- Dimensional Structure: Factor analyses confirmed that items designated to procedural fairness, voice, and justification loaded cleanly onto their hypothesized latent factors, exhibiting high primary factor loadings (λ > .60) and minimal cross-loadings (λ < .25).
- Model Fit in Structural Equation Modeling: A structural model specifying voice and justification as distinct exogenous determinants influencing procedural fairness, which in turn predicted organizational commitment and intention to remain, demonstrated excellent model fit. The goodness-of-fit index (GFI > .90) and root mean square residual (RMSR < .05) supported the structural separation of procedural mechanics (voice and justification) from global fairness appraisals.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
- Full Instrument Name: Procedural Fairness, Employee Voice, and Justification Scale
- Authors: Joseph P. Daly and Paul D. Geyer (1994)
- Constructs Measured: Structural procedural fairness, process control / pre-decisional employee voice, and informational justification.
- Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized self-administered survey.
- Target Population: Adult employees, managers, and organizational personnel experiencing organizational transitions, restructuring, or policy shifts.
- Item Count: 11 items total (4 Procedural Fairness items, 4 Voice items, 3 Justification items).
- Response Format: Standard 5-point Likert-type scale: 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral / Neither Agree nor Disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree.
- Scoring Protocol: Items designated with “(R)” are reverse-scored prior to calculating composite scores (i.e., 1 → 5, 2 → 4, 3 → 3, 4 → 2, 5 → 1). Subscale scores are obtained by calculating the arithmetic mean of the respective items. Higher mean scores indicate greater perceptions of procedural equity, voice opportunities, and communicative justification.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
Publication Year: 1994
Copyright & Permissions: The scale was originally published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior (Vol. 15, Issue 7, pp. 623–638), copyrighted © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Academic researchers may utilize the instrument for non-commercial educational and empirical research purposes, provided proper scholarly citation is attributed to Daly and Geyer (1994). Commercial implementation, inclusion within commercial diagnostic suites, or for-profit organizational consulting requires formal permission from John Wiley & Sons or through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).
References
Bies, R. J., & Moag, J. S. (1986). Interactional justice: Communication criteria of fairness. In R. J. Lewicki, B. H. Sheppard, & M. H. Bazerman (Eds.), Research on Negotiation in Organizations (Vol. 1, pp. 43–55). JAI Press.
Daly, J. P., & Geyer, P. D. (1994). The role of fairness in implementing large-scale change: Employee evaluations of process and outcome in seven facility relocations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15(7), 623–638. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.4030150704
Leventhal, G. S. (1980). What should be done with equity theory? New approaches to the study of fairness in social relationships. In K. J. Gergen, M. S. Greenberg, & R. H. Willis (Eds.), Social Exchange: Advances in Theory and Research (pp. 27–55). Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3087-5_2
Lind, E. A., & Tyler, T. R. (1988). The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice. Plenum Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-2115-4
Thibaut, J., & Walker, L. (1975). Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis. L. Erlbaum Associates.
Tyler, T. R., & Lind, E. A. (1992). A relational model of authority in groups. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 115–191. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60283-X