Hedging your bets: Uncertainty about continued success reduces people's desire for high procedural fairness

A central tenet of organizational justice theory is that people prefer decisions to be made with higher than with lower procedural fairness. The results of five studies unearthed a boundary condition for this general tendency. People who experienced non-contingent success had less of a desire to be treated with higher procedural fairness relative to their counterparts who experienced contingent success. Furthermore, four of the five studies examined moderating influences on the relationship between success contingency and fairness preferences and found, as predicted, that the relationship was stronger when people were more motivated to protect against threats to the self.