Justice to Generate Trust, Two Aspects of Human Relationships in Management

Abstract

Justice and trust have largely been considered important in organizations, to generate sustainable management practices that when maintained generate improvements over time. Trust is the organizational glue allowing people to enter into mutual benefiting interactions and relationships for a continuous long-term coordination. Trust is unavoidable as not all participants have all the information and should rely on others' decisions. Justice is a personal virtue that affects all the relationship participants, the decision-maker, the recipient and the beholder. Justice is also a perception of these participants about decisions, people involved and results. Justice as a personal virtue is important for the decision-making, but as an organizational value is coming as a set of requisites for organizational formal and informal systems. In this chapter I aim at understanding the foundations of trust, understanding justice dimensions, and finally disentangling the relationship between trust and justice and how both can mutually be cause and effect of each other. I also examine how trust and justice brought together may cause other desired effects into organizational performance. I propose an understanding of the interplay between trust and justice that helps to improve management practices and their design to maintain and promote economical and socially sustainable organizations.