The Role of Empathy in Justice System

One of the health psychological functions which help people to share their affects and opinions with other people and display more altruistic and cooperative behaviours toward others is empathy (Cropanzano et al, 2017). Some social psychology researchers have underlined the role of empathy in morality (e.g., Batson 2009; Eisenberg and Fabes 1990; Tyler et al. 1997; Wispe 1986). Yip and Schweitzer (2016) found that empathy mediates the relationship between anger and deception. Low levels of empathy to organizations have strong impact on the link between anger and unethical behaviour. People who are angry have more intention to engage in unethical behaviours depending on their levels of empathy to organization. Additional evidences showed that empathy increases employees” carefulness about justice judgments and decline their intention to blame victims because of their own moral conditions (e.g., Aderman et al., 1974; Patient and Skarlicki, 2010). In another study, Cropanzano, Massaro & Becker (2017) depicted that individuals endeavour for applying justice rules is related to their cognitive and affective empathy to another person or organization, in order to that the probability of their effort to apply justice rules increase when they experience cognitive and affective empathy to the organization. Cognitive empathy refers to understanding the other peoples feeling and thinking through deliberative thought. While, affective empathy is sharing the emotional experiences with other people such as coworkers in the organization (Walter, 2012).

Other mediators and moderators of the relationship between organizational unfairness and ethical/unethical behaviour Moral identity is a moderator between unfairness and unethical behaviour. People who have experienced unfairness have more intention to engage in unethical behaviours depending on their levels of moral identity. Moral identity decreases the effects of unfairness on unethical behaviour. In addition, other findings illustrate that managers whose moral identity are high show more motivation to intention to penalize wrongdoers such as colleagues with unfair behaviours (Skarlicki and Rupp 2010).

By emphasizing the different aspects of justice/injustice, researchers have been referred to some of the moderators and mediators in distributive justice such as personality factors, equity sensitivity, a construct which refers to sensitivity for capturing the differences between input/outcome ration (Huseman, HatWeld, & Miles, 1987) and motivation (Zapata-Phelan, Colquitt, Scott & Livingston, 2009). About the moderators of procedural justice there has been referred to locus of control (Sweeney, McFarlin, & Cotton, 1991), delay of gratification (Joy & Witt, 1992), sensitivity to befallen injustice (SBI; Schmitt and Dorfel, 1999), self-esteem (Brockner et al., 1998) and exchange ideology (Witt, Kacmar, & Andrews, 2001), and the belief in a just world (Hagedoorn, Buunk, and van de Vliert, 2002). Also, some of the moderators of interactional justice are agreeableness (Skarlicki et al., 1999) and self-esteem (Heuer, Blumenthal, Douglas, and Weinblatt, 1999). On the integrative theories (named “integrative wave” of the justice literature; Colquitt et al., 2005), researchers have indicated trust propensity, risk aversion (tolerance of risk) and morality (Colquitt, Scott, Judge and Shaw, 2006).