My Journey with Justice

Abstract

This chapter describes the author’s journey as a justice scholar, beginning with his first exposure to the area as an undergraduate working on an honors thesis. The author details how he engaged with the literature during graduate school and how his major contributions to the literature came about. Those contributions included a new measure of justice, the first metaanalysis of the literature, and integrations of justice with three other areas: teams, personality, and trust. He also describes an intrinsic motivation-based model that explains much of his influence and longevity as a justice scholar. Rooted in Spreitzer’s 1995 work on psychological empowerment, the model recommends that scholars: choose topics because of intrinsic interest rather than practicality or inertia; play to conceptual and methodological strengths when shaping projects; do research that improves the workplace while collaborating with PhD students whenever possible; and strive to do bigger projects that are relevant to the entire expanse of a literature.