ABSTRACT
The research reported in this chapter explores employees’ justice judgments of their salary, either they are moral judgments, or predominantly reflect material self-interests in higher wages. Until now, this question has been widely neglected in organizational research. In this research tradition, standardized questionnaires using the term “justice” as a stimulus are common practice. Consequently, justice judgments are part of moral judgments by definition. Therefore, the analytical concept is based on the respondents’ understanding of the term “justice” and not on a construct postulated by the researcher (Walster and Walster, 1975). Philosophical theories of justice, however, do not consider these judgments as moral per se. Instead, the philosophical perspective repeatedly points to two criteria in order to clarify whether a judgment should be viewed as a moral one. The first criterion is judging a person’s impartiality in relation to other persons who are involved in the distribution. The second criterion is whether the judging person refers to moral rules for distribution (cp. Barry, 1995; Liebig, 2001; Soltan, 1987: 25 et seq.; Singer, 1997; Swift, 1999).
