Dr. Alex Rubenstein accepted for publication in the Journal of Management

For release:  August 9, 2017

Dr. Alex Rubenstein, assistant professor in the Department of Management, was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Management for his paper entitled, "What's past (and present) is prologue: Interactions between justice levels and trajectories predicting behavioral reciprocity." Dr. Rubenstein co-authored this paper with Dr. David Allen, Texas Christian University, and Dr. Frank Bosco, Virginia Commonwealth University.

Much of organizational justice research has tended to take a static approach, linking employees' contemporaneous justice levels to outcomes of interest. In the present study, the authors tested a dynamic model emphasizing the interactive influences of both justice levels and trajectories for predicting behavioral social exchange outcomes. Specifically, their model posited both main effects and interactions between present justice levels and past justice changes over time in predicting helping behavior and voluntary turnover behavior. Data over four yearly measurement periods from 4,348 employees of a banking organization generally supported the notion that justice trajectories interact with absolute levels to predict both outcomes. Together, the findings highlight how employees invoke present fairness evaluations within the context of past fairness trends—rather than either in isolation—to inform decisions about behaviorally reciprocating at work.

"The Department of Management is very pleased to see that Dr. Rubenstein is consistently publishing his research in top-tier management journals," said Dr. Chuck Pierce, chair of the Department of Management. "We are very proud of his scholarly efforts and to have him as a colleague in our department."