Classroom Justice 9
containing items for students to evaluate the fairness of their grades compared not only to those
received by other students, but to their own expectations, past experiences, and norms may affect
the relationship between distributive justice and student outcomes and would be a broader, more
accurate indicator of distributive justice as defined by Adams (1965) and Cropanzano and
Greenberg (1997), among other theorists. Therefore, the current study seeks to replicate Author’s
findings concerning procedural justice and indirect aggressiveness and to investigate the
relationship between distributive justice and indirect interpersonal aggressiveness using a newer,
expanded measure of distributive justice. This revised measure requires students to evaluate the
fairness of their grades relative to other students’ grades, their own expectations, past
experiences, and other standards. The first hypothesis addresses these objectives:
H1:
Student perceptions of distributive and procedural justice in a course will
negatively predict likelihood of indirectly aggressing toward the instructor of that
course.
Related to indirect aggression, but not yet investigated in the instructional context, is the
association between student perceptions of justice and student hostility toward their instructors.
As organizational justice research demonstrates, employees who perceive they have been treated
unfairly tend to hold and express hostile feelings about the organization (Greenberg, 1987b;
Schweiger et al., 1987). It is plausible, then, to expect that students who perceive they have been
treated unjustly by their instructors will communicate hostility toward their instructors. The
second hypothesis concerns this relationship.
H2: Student perceptions of distributive and procedural justice in a course will
negatively predict likelihood of expressing hostility toward the instructor of that
course.
Convention