The fairness judgements of received pay and their determinants

Abstract

Recent reviews indicate that little is known about individuals' fairness judgements of their own received pay and the bases underlying these judgements. This paper reports the results of an investigation into the subject, based on a cross‐sectional city sample of 222 employees in Israel. The investigation focused on several prevalent theoretical propositions about the bases of fairness judgements and a number of hypotheses derived from them. The findings indicate that pay fairness evaluations may be based on comparisons with similar as well as dissimilar others; that they are guided by norms of contribution as well as norms of need; that feelings of inequity develop where inputs/investments are undervalued in terms of prevalent norms of just exchange ratios. The findings also indicate that variances in the individuals' frames of reference are partly related to a variety of background characteristics such as sex, age, income, education, etc.