The utility of a multifoci approach to the study of organizational justice: A meta-analytic investigation into the consideration of normative rules, moral accountability, bandwidth-fidelity, and social exchange

•Justice perceptions involve holding a party accountable for violating justice rules.•We test the multifoci model meta-analytically using the entire justice literature.•Multifoci justice perceptions outpredict type-based justice perceptions.•Multifoci justice perceptions outpredict target similar (vs. dissimilar) outcomes.•Target similarity effects were mediated by source-specific social exchange.

Multifoci justice pulls from research on social exchange theory to argue that despite the proliferation of rule sets in the literature (often referred to as the “types” of justice), individuals seek to hold some party accountable for the violation/upholding of such rules, and it is these parties (e.g., supervisors, the organization as a whole) that are most likely to be the recipients of attitudes and behaviors (i.e., target similarity effects). To explore these issues, we meta-analytically (k = 647, N = 235,682) compared the predictive validities of source- vs. type-based justice perceptions and found that (a) multifoci justice perceptions more strongly predicted outcomes directed at matched sources than did type-based justice perceptions, (b) multifoci justice perceptions more strongly predicted target similar than dissimilar outcomes, and (c) the relationships between multifoci justice perceptions and target similar outcomes were mediated by source-specific social exchange.