Procedural Justice

What it is

The idea comes from the psychology of legal disputes. John Thibaut and Laurens Walker's Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis (1975) argued that people's satisfaction with a dispute depends on the process as well as on the verdict, and that having control over the process, voice, makes an unfavourable outcome easier to accept. E. Allan Lind and Tom Tyler extended the account in The Social Psychology of Procedural Justice (1988), and in a 1997 cross-cultural study with Yuen Huo found that relational judgements, status recognition, trust in benevolence and neutrality, explained much of what people meant by a fair procedure in the United States, Germany, Hong Kong and Japan.

Service researchers took it into complaint handling. Stephen Tax, Stephen Brown and Murali Chandrashekaran showed in 1998 that customers judge a complaint incident by the outcome, by the procedures used to reach it and by the interpersonal treatment, and procedural justice is the second of the three. In this setting the procedure covers how long the firm takes, how many people the customer has to speak to, whether the policy is flexible, and how hard it was to complain at all.

In effect

Moshe Davidow's 2003 review in the Journal of Service Research split organisational responses to complaints into six dimensions, and two of them are procedural: timeliness, the perceived speed of the response, and facilitation, the policies and structures that support customers in complaining. Facilitation had the steadier record. Eight of the nine studies he reviewed found a positive effect of facilitation on satisfaction. Timeliness was mixed, and Davidow proposed that it may only be a critical factor after an unreasonable delay.

That reading fits the experimental evidence. In Jochen Wirtz and Anna Mattila's 2004 experiment, compensation, speed and apology had a joint effect on satisfaction. An immediate response combined with an apology left compensation with nothing to add, and a delayed response without an apology was something compensation could not repair. Speed did its work in combination with the treatment.

In the 2011 meta-analysis by Katja Gelbrich and Holger Roschk, procedures were one of the three organisational responses feeding the three kinds of justice. The headline of that study concerned the other two, distributive and interactional, with loyalty depending slightly more on treatment than on outcome.

A neighbouring result shows the procedural point from a different angle. In Nira Munichor and Anat Rafaeli's 2007 telephone experiment, callers held for the same length of time were far less likely to hang up when told their position in the queue than when they heard apologies. Information about the process did what an apology during it could not.

What it does not say

It does not say speed always matters. Davidow's review found timeliness results mixed, and the most defensible reading is a threshold: below a reasonable delay, faster is not obviously better, and above it, slowness damages everything else.

It does not say a fair procedure makes an unfair outcome acceptable in every case. The original courtroom research found that voice softened the sting of an unfavourable verdict; it did not abolish it. In complaint handling, procedure works alongside outcome and treatment rather than instead of them.

The vault note behind this page is marked unreviewed, because its legal and organisational sources have not been through the site's evidence review. The service recovery findings quoted here come from the papers listed below.

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