Researchers have suggested that employees assess the fairness of important social entities such as supervisors and organizations, but little empirical research has examined the rules used in forming such justice judgments. Utilizing a qualitative design, we asked new job entrants to assess the fairness of their supervisor and organization, and to elaborate on the reasons underlying their assessments. Our results reveal that, although individuals did use rules reflecting the four traditional justice dimensions in assessing entity-based fairness, they more frequently used other rules, drawing on such information as the entity's attributes, their own affective state, and social information.

We describe two theoretical explanations for the amount, pace, and costs of the prestige enhancement a firm engages in during the year before its initial public offering. The “snowball model” captures well-known processes whereby prestige-rich organizations accumulate even more prestige. The “dressing-up model” builds upon deadline-induced remediation, a phenomenon not previously studied in a macro-organizational context. In 242 software IPOs, the snowball model substantially explains final-year prestigious hiring. But there is also strong evidence of a tandem dressing-up process. As the final year counts down, prestige-poor firms aggressively hire prestigious executives and directors and pay higher prices to do so.

This study examined how the performance of diverse teams is affected by member openness to experience and the extent to which team reward structure emphasizes intragroup differences. Fifty-eight heterogeneous four-person teams engaged in an interactive task. Teams in which reward structure converged with diversity (i.e., “faultline” teams) performed more poorly than teams in which reward structure cut across differences between group members or pointed to a “superordinate identity.” High openness to experience positively influenced teams in which differences were salient (i.e., faultline and “cross-categorized” teams) but not teams with a superordi-nate identity. This effect was mediated by information elaboration.