Background
The climate crisis is one of the most urgent problems of our time, demanding strong actions in the very short term. One of these actions is the change from a fossil fuel based energy system to a low-carbon energy system. The newly introduced energy technologies, such as wind, solar, and geothermal energy, however, tend to also come with costs and risks, leading to resistance from citizens. For the successfulness of the introduction of new energy systems, it seems paramount to at least have a fair introduction of new energy technologies such as by having a fair distribution of costs, risks and benefits, and by giving people a voice. Perceived distributive and procedural fairness have indeed been recognized to have a positive effect on acceptance of new energy projects (Huijts et al., 2012).
While distributive and procedural fairness are indeed recognized as the two important fairness considerations in the domain of energy research and social science, organisational psychology generally acknowledges an additional type of fairness in the context of organizations, being interactional fairness (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2013). This type of fairness is considered to consist of the sub-dimensions of interpersonal and informational fairness. Perhaps interactional fairness also contributes to our understanding of perceived fairness of energy projects. An important question is how people experience interactional fairness in the context of the energy transition and whether it is indeed an additional important dimension of fairness in the energy transition context? You will study this in the context of an actual energy project.
Research questions
1. How do people judge interactional fairness in the energy transition?
2. Does interactional fairness explain overall fairness and acceptance judgments over and above distributive and procedural fairness measurements?
3. Do characteristics of energy projects differently influence interactional fairness than they influence distributive and procedural fairness?
Type of research
Survey research
Keywords
Fairness, energy transition, interactional fairness,
Information
If you are interested in this topic, please contact Steven Watson via s.j.watson@utwente.nl.
Literature
Bies, R. J., & Moag, J. S. (1986). Interactional justice: communication criteria of fairness. In Research in negotiations in organizations.
Colquitt, J. A., Conlon, D. E., Wesson, M. J., Porter, C. O. L. H., & Ng, K. Y. (2001). Justice at the millenium: A meta-analytic review of 25 years of organizational justice research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(3), 425–445.
Colquitt, J. A., Scott, B. A., Rodell, J. B., Long, D. M., Zapata, C. P., & Conlon, D. E. (2013). Justice at the millenium, a decade later: a meta-analytic test of social exchange and affect-based perspectives. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), 199–236.
Cropanzano, R., Fortin, M., & Kirk, J. F. (2015). How do we know when we are treated fairly? Justice rules and fairness judgments. Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management.