Explanations: What Factors Enhance Their Perceived Adequacy?

Factors that enhance the perceived adequacy of explanations for bad news were examined in three studies: two cross-sectional surveys and a simulation experiment. All studies found that the specificity of the explanation's substance accounted for more variance in judgments of explanation adequacy than did the interpersonal sensitivity of the explanation's delivery. Moderators of the relationship between explanation features and perceptions of explanation adequacy were found as well: These explanation features enhanced the perceived adequacy of explanations more when outcomes of greater, rather than lesser, severity were being explained, and when the explanation was delivered verbally instead of in writing. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Article: By giving workers explanations, managers can enhance the likelihood that employees will perceive the procedures or reasons underlying their decisions as fair (Bies & Shapiro, 1987, 1988; Bies, Shapiro, & Cummings, 1988). In addition to amplifying this perception of justice, explanations have been found to reduce the chance that employees who are negatively affected by managerial decisions will complain (Bies et al., 1988), have high rates of absenteeism or turnover (Brockner, DeWitt, Grover, & Reed, 1990), and steal from the company (Greenberg, 1990). Consequently, researchers have increasingly pointed to explanations as a critical conflict management technique. The negative relationship between providing explanations and such reactions has been consistently qualified, however. In all of the studies just mentioned, only those explanations perceived to be "adequate" mitigated subordinates' negative reactions. Similar results have obtained in the laboratory, where researchers have found that the feelings of anger and resentment felt by subjects victimized by another's apparent impropriety (e.g., a late-arriving partner or a rule change in the middle of a competitive game) were mitigated only when adequate (good) excuses or explanations were presented (Folger, Rosenfield, & Robinson, 1983; Weiner, Folkes, Amirkhan, & Verette, 1987, Study 3). Thus, the consensus among researchers examining  An abbreviated version of this paper received the 1991 Best Paper Award from the Conflict Management Division of the National Academy of Management. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Jeanne Brett and two anonymous reviewers. the conflict management potential of explanations is that the critical factor driving the justiceenhancing effect of explanations is, not merely their provision but, their perceived adequacy. Although researchers have theorized about what factors enhance explanations' perceived adequacy (cf. Bies, 1987), very little research has examined this issue (see Shapiro, 1991, for an exception). Absent knowing this, managers cannot use explanations effectively as a means of reducing workers' perceptions of injustice and subsequent "conflictinducing" reactions (Baron, 1988), such as complaints, absenteeism, turnover, or employee theft. The purpose of the present investigation was to examine factors that enhance the perceived adequacy of explanations. In this paper, we report the results of three investigations—two crosssectional surveys addressing actual rejection decisions and their accompanying explanations, and a simulation experiment—in an effort to examine the factors that enhance or diminish the perceived adequacy of explanations. In the first study, we examine job candidates' adequacy judgments of explanations they received for firms' rejection decisions, as influenced by the explainer's perceived concern, the perceived reasonableness of the explanation's substance, and the severity of the rejection decision. In the second study, with another sample of job candidates we reexamine the issues explored in the first study with improved measures and additional predictor variables, namely, the influence of the "form" and timeliness of an explanation (i.e., whether the explanation is stated verbally or in writing, and stated in a timely manner, respectively). In the third study, we experimentally manipulate, via scenarios, factors found to influence judgments of explanations' adequacy in our first two studies, to ease our ability to test for interactions among our predictor variables, and to infer causal relationships. WHAT DIFFERENTIATES ADEQUATE FROM INADEQUATE EXPLANATIONS? The findings of recent investigations of explanations, taken together, suggest that two features of explanations influence their perceived adequacy: the style with which an explanation is delivered and aspects of an explanation's content. With respect to style, Bies et al. (1988) found that when employees perceived their boss's explanation for denying a resource request to be sincere rather than insincere, they tended to perceive the explanation as adequate. Left unexplained, however, was the relative importance of the explainer's perceived sincerity compared to other elements of the explanation in accounting for adequacy judgments. Such knowledge might have helped Bies et al. understand why, despite the boss's perceived sincerity, subordinates judged some explanations to be more adequate than others. In a recent laboratory study, Greenberg (1993) created a situation where participants would feel inequity (i.e., due to a reduction in the amount of pay they had been promised) and examined the extent to which judgments of justice and theft reactions would be influenced by an explanation's content ("informational integrity") versus delivery ("interpersonal sensitivity"). As expected, both of these factors significantly affected these reactions, reducing subjects' tendency to perceive inequity and, when the experimenter was not looking, to pay oneself more than the experimenter instructed. However, Greenberg did not measure the effect of these factors on recipients' judgments of the explanation's adequacy. Thus, a question yet to be answered is the relative importance of style and content in the formation of adequacy judgments; put differently, to what extent should managers who must deliver unfavorable news show interpersonal sensitivity and/or provide thorough information? We explored this question in the studies reported here. In addition, we examined how adequacy judgments are influenced by outcome severity, or the "badness" of the news being explained. Studies of explanation effects have considered situations that represent various levels of severity, including resource refusals (Bies & Shapiro, 1987, 1988; Bies et al., 1988), pay cuts (Greenberg, 1990), layoffs involving others (Brockner et al., 1990), and actual layoffs (Konovsky & Folger, 1991). In their sample of layoff victims—arguably among the most severe of work outcomes—Konovsky and Folger found that explanations failed to enhance perceptions of justice. Perceptions of explanation adequacy, however, have not been explored in connection with outcome severity. We build on prior work in the present investigation by considering not only how outcome severity may itself influence adequacy judgments, but how it may moderate the relationship between explanation features and perceived adequacy.