Interview of Thomas Kieselbach, Professor of Work and Health Psychology, Head of the research institute Work, Unemployment and Health (IPG) University of Bremen, Chairman of the Scientific Committee « Unemployment, Job Insecurity and Health » of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH).
As a psychologist, what does justice mean for you ?
In social psychology justice is a subjective experience: the impression of a fair distribution of scarce services or goods, a fair procedure in dealing with it, a fair communication about outcomes and decisions. Take for example the helping process, which is obviously ruled by justice dimension. If you observe a person in need of help, it will make a difference if you think this person is responsible for his situation or you consider him as an innocent victim. You will give your help much more easily if you consider her as a victim rather than responsible for what happened to her. Justice considerations are prevailing in any human activities. There are several levels of justice considerations. People treated fairly could accept some difficult outcome, even if the outcomes are not very good. But if the procedure is not experienced as fair, they will react very negatively. The interactional justice means how a decision is communicated to those affected or to the public. If we apply these justice notions to the employment situation, we can say that they are very crucial for the functioning of an organisation or an institution. They are not only based on moral; they prevail in many individual and organisational actions.
Do you think the notion of justice has a relevant role to play now in the present crisis ?
The naive perception of people is the following, it is the belief in a just world. The people find easy to orient themselves with that belief in their lives even if they know that this beliefs leads to many disillusions. When you have an experience that you made an input and you have not been rewarded adequately for that, you will experience this as a disequilibrium.
If these experience will happen repeatedly this may lead to a gratification crisis. According to Johannes Siegrist, such a gratification crisis follows « the effort-reward imbalance » a leading theoretical concept explaining the functioning of stressors at the workplace. The individual psycho-social health of employees is centrally influenced by such an imbalance at the workplace. This is a very important psycho-social stressor, responsible for many ill -health factors, starting with cardio-vascular diseases, leading to increased morbidity but in the long run increased mortality as well.
Justice considerations have not come to the front of the situation, up to now. But I am convinced that the will. Take for example the ratio for remunerations between employees and top managers. Some decades ago, we accepted that it could be 1 to 40. But it came to 1 to 400, even 1 to 1000 in our countries, the ratio for Wal-Mart CEO vs average salary of a worker is 1200. This created new inequities and people start thinking about what gratification they can get through their individual activities. When governments intervene into banks, there were few countries only where the debate was led with conditions put for maximum wages of top managers. In Switzerland the direct support of the government for UBS amounting to 6 Million SFrs in October 2008 did not cover the bonus payments for UBS manager in the same year. In Germany, the minister of finance said that the public money could only be associated with the request to reduce immediately the salary of bank managers to a maximum of 500.000 € a year. May be it was counterproductive because some banks, manager-driven, refused the money in order not to reduce their salaries. Mr Ackerman, the CEO of Deutsche Bank, said last December that for 500 000 €, he will never get up in the morning!
If you need to convince employees that organisational changes associated with possible job losses are justified and not evitable, you must look at justice considerations. The proclaimed goal for a certain rate of ROI (not 7-10% as it was considered to be sufficient in the past but up to 20-25%) associated with announcements of job losses – and the Deutsche Bank linked both explicitly in 2007 – is a very critical issue in that respect.
Is restructuring fair that is the question? If it is not fair in your eyes, you will consider yourself as a victim with many consequences. The balance between gains and losses is part of the justice process.
In the last 20 years, the justice dimension was not very present. This has already changed. And the question of legitimacy of change will gain new ground in the actual debates about the goals of present and future restructuring.
How and why do you associate justice, health and restructuring?
We just finished to write a European report about health in restructuring (the HIRES report and in France ASTREES and ANACT contributed to it). One of our results and a core part of the HIRES recommendations is that trust ad experienced justice will influence to a considerable extent the way restructuring can be carried out. Selection processes need to be clear, transparent, and fair. Favouritism or unjustifiable discrimination will undermine feelings of trust. The internal and external communication about the goals and procedures of restructuring, e.g., when employees are informed by the media first or when they get the impression that management does not listen to their views and those of their representatives this will increase resistance to change and thus prevent the buy-in of the staff into the process of change.
Interview made by Claude Emmanuel Triomphe
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