In justice we trust: A model of the role of trust in the organization in applicant reactions to the selection process

Despite the reliance on organizational justice in applicant reactions research, and the research attention devoted to the relationship between organizational justice and organizational trust (Brockner, J., & Siegel, P. (1996). Understanding the interaction between procedural and distributive justice: The role of trust. In R. Kramer, & T. Tyler (Eds.), Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research (pp. 390–413). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Lewicki, R. J., Wiethoff, C., & Tomlinson, E. C. (2005). What is the role of trust in organizational justice? In J. Greenberg, & J. A. Colquitt (Eds.), Handbook of Organizational Justice (pp. 247–270). Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), to date little, if any, attention has been directed to combining organizational justice and organizational trust perspectives in applicant reactions research. In this paper, we first review extant applicant reactions literature which has been based on the organizational justice literature. We then develop a model that integrates organizational justice and trust perspectives to better understand the processes underlying applicant reactions across different stages of the selection process. We explain how the propositions derived from this model can inform future research on applicant reactions to selection procedures.