Ingratiation and popularity as antecedents of justice: A social exchange and social capital perspective

•We investigate ingratiation and popularity as antecedents of justice.•Social exchange and social capital theories provide theoretical lenses.•LMX mediates the relationship between ingratiation and justice.•Ingratiation and popularity interact (substitute) predicting LMX.•Results from three studies (field and experimental) confirm hypotheses.

We contribute to an emerging literature viewing organizational justice as an endogenous outcome that employees may attempt to proactively influence instead of an exogenous event to which employees react. Drawing on social capital and social exchange theory, we test a model whereby employees’ ingratiation toward their supervisor leads to higher levels of justice as a result of higher leader–member exchange (LMX) quality. We further identify employee’s popularity as a boundary condition, such that popular employees do not benefit from ingratiation in terms of LMX quality. Across three studies utilizing a variety of methodological designs, assessing constructs from different sources, and taking place in both controlled experimental settings as well as field settings, we largely find consistent results for our hypotheses. Overall, our findings extend theory on organizational justice by illuminating the role that employees’ volitional behavior, as well as the social context surrounding that behavior, play in influencing justice.