Justice in inter-organizational relationships: A literature review and future research agenda

Abstract Organizational justice has made contributions to the inter-organizational literature by highlighting the effects of justice perceptions on behavioral, attitudinal, and organizational outcomes. However, research on justice perceptions remains scattered and falls short of addressing key elements of justice, and how these elements interact in an inter-organizational context. The lack of understanding calls for a comprehensive review and synthesis of extant studies. After a careful initial review of 375 papers from 1995 to 2018, this paper consolidates 79 papers on organizational justice at an inter-organizational level with respect to theoretical perspectives, methodologies, contexts, and research findings. The thematic and descriptive analyses offer deeper insights into the varying effects of different organizational justice dimensions, and bring forward limitations of current research including a focus on a: single side of the dyad, static view of justice, and single level of analysis. Consequently, the synthesis section, derived from the thematic analysis, draws out three fruitful key themes including: i) justice asymmetry; ii) justice dynamics; and iii) multilevel view of justice. The study positions fruitful research questions for each theme, before presenting the study's limitations and implications.


Introduction
Effectively managing inter-organizational relationships has long been a central topic in business and industrial marketing (Möller & Halinen, 1999), supply chain (Griffith, Harvey, & Lusch, 2006;Roehrich & Lewis, 2014), strategic management (Ariño & Ring, 2010), and general management (Kang & Jindal, 2015) studies. Rapidly changing demands in dynamic markets have generated increased interdependence between firms seeking to gain access to, for instance, valuable resources, capabilities, and knowledge (Yang, Sivadas, Kang, & Oh, 2012;Zaefarian, Najafi-Tavani, Henneberg, & Naudé, 2016). This environment has motivated a myriad of research studies to explore approaches to maintaining and effectively managing inter-organizational relationships (e.g. Caldwell, Roehrich, & George, 2017;Roehrich, Selviaridis, Kalra, van der Valk, & Fang, 2020). The management of these relationships has a significant effect on performance outcomes, and both academia and practice alike have become interested in attitudinal and behavioral factors that are relevant to drive relationship performance.
Extant literature has initially defined organizational justice as an employee's perception of the organization's environment of justice (Greenberg, 1990). Such perception is later extended from the personal to the interorganizational level (Kumar et al., 1995) to understand better whether all partnering organizations participate fairly and equitably in decisions that affect the ability to operate competitively (Kumar et al., 1995). More recent studies have categorized justice in inter-organizational relationships as procedural, distributive, and interactional (Duffy, Fearne, Hornibrook, Hutchinson, & Reid, 2013), emphasizing that justice is the foundation of a partnership and a key factor in the motivation for continued collaboration (Luo et al., 2015).
An expansive body of organizational behavior and psychology literature has focused on the nature of intra-firm justice with an emphasis on identifying the dimensions of justice and how they influence interactions at this level (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & NG, 2001). However, comparatively very limited research has been conducted on inter-organizational justice, and existing studies have tended to ignore the basic features of inter-organizational relationships (Lumineau & Oliveira, 2018). For instance, research focused on one side of the dyad thereby missing the opportunity to examine potential asymmetries of justice perceptions between partners in business-to-business relationships (Liu et al., 2012). Moreover, even though inter-organizational relationships are dynamic, much of the literature has tended to adopt a static approach (Narasimhan et al., 2013). The exploration of justice dynamics of how inter-organizational justice (and its dimensions) develops as a series of events that partners experience over the relationship's life-cycle is limited. Thus, prior research efforts leave the inter-organizational justice literature largely fragmented (Loosemore & Lim, 2015), calling for a comprehensive analysis and synthesis to pave future research avenues.
In order to address these shortcomings in prior studies, we conducted a systematic literature review by consolidating existing knowledge of interorganizational justice (Nicholson, LaPlaca, Al-Abdin, Breese, & Khan, 2018). In total, we reviewed 79 articles. We synthesized key findings, clarified current research themes, and also identified future research avenues. Thus, this study addresses the following research questions: (i) What is the current state of interorganizational justice research?; and (ii) What are the emerging themes of interest for management research? We explore these questions in the justice literature by specifically addressing the relevant literature at the interorganizational level. This is accomplished by developing a research agenda based on comprehensive bibliographic analyses and synthesis of published management literature over more than two decades.
This timely review of inter-organizational justice is particularly imperative for scholars interested in business-to-business and industrial markets, as well as inter-organizational relationship management. Particularly, the relevance of justice to industrial marketing is underpinned by the fit of conceptual proximity between the concept of justice and key extant industrial marketing research such as the IMP interaction approach (Oswick, Fleming, & Hanlon, 2011). For instance, the IMP approach puts a significant emphasis on relationship quality between partnering organizations and postulates that relationship quality inherently predicts the interactions in a dyad (Håkansson & Snehota, 1989;Johnsen, Miemczyk, & Howard, 2017). Such interaction occurs within a relationship atmosphere, characterized by power, trust, cooperation, and conflict (Ellram & Murfield, 2019). Similarly, inter-organizational justice serves as a critical antecedent of relationship quality that shapes relationship atmosphere in which organizations operate (Kumar et al., 1995;Woo & Ennew, 2004). Interorganizational justice and the IMP approach both emphasize the interactions between partnering organizations that drive the formation of relationship quality (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel, & Rupp, 2001;Håkansson & Snehota, 1989). Both organizations (e.g. buyers and suppliers) are autonomous, but interdependent, entities which actively make decisions that shape and are shaped by the relationship climate, thus impacting each other's perception of justice (Hu & Sheu, 2005;Walumbwa, Hartnell, & Oke, 2010).
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: after outlining the systematic review and synthesis method, we analyze the justice literature for specific patterns and trends. We then offer a synthesis of justice research, and discuss opportunities for future research. The paper concludes by drawing out implications for both theory and practice.

Review methodology
The paper adopted a systematic review approach to consolidate extant literature regarding organizational justice at the inter-organizational level (Denyer & Tranfield, 2009;Tranfield, Denyer, & Smart, 2003). A literature review is vital in establishing key themes and relationships amongst the concepts under study, thus driving more structured future research efforts (Burgess, Singh, & Koroglu, 2006). It aims to synthesize past findings, understand how methodology supports conceptual frameworks, and bridge future studies with existing questions and concerns (Thorpe, Holt, Macpherson, & Pittaway, 2005).
Our approach embraced an explicit sequence of procedures in which a set of clearly defined searching protocols were followed to mitigate researcher's bias, and ensure procedural transparency and outcome reproducibility (Crossan & Apaydin, 2010). We established a comprehensive search and analysis framework by incorporating database search, cross-referencing between authors, and applying agreed inclusion and exclusion criteria (Durach, Kembro, & Wieland, 2017). Following Denyer and Tranfield (2009), we commenced with guiding review questions derived from discussions with five subject experts from business and academia as well as an initial scoping study in which seminal organizational justice papers were thoroughly studied and analyzed. This initial analysis was helpful to establish a focus for subsequent search, analysis, and synthesis stages by, for example, specifying the search period and terms as well as formulating guiding review questions. We then focused on locating, selecting, and appraising studies (Denyer & Tranfield, 2009). The domains for the search strategy included conceptual and empirical papers addressing the applications of organizational justice in inter-organizational settings. We included a range of different types of inter-organizational relationships and did not focus our study solely on one type of relationship such as buyer-supplier relationships.
Consequently, our review approach was inclusive of the types of business relationships frequently discussed in the literature (Lumineau & Oliveira, 2018).
The selection and evaluation criteria applied to our systematic review were as follows: i.

The comprehensive ISI Web of Knowledge's Social Sciences
Citation Index (SSCI) database (Coombes & Nicholson, 2013) was adopted to examine the years from 1995 to 2018. As to the authors' best knowledge, no previous systematic review on organizational justice with a focus on the inter-organizational level has been conducted in the literature.
The first paper explicitly discussing inter-organizational justice was published in 1995 (Kumar et al., 1995). This paper generated increased interest and efforts into extending the concept of organizational justice, and its role in developing inter-organizational relationships.
iii. The substantive relevance of articles was ensured by selecting "(in)justice* or (in)just*" in the title, abstract or keywords.
iv. The relevance of articles at the inter-organizational level was ensured by selecting papers that have at least one of the following keywords in their abstracts and/or keyword list: "cooperat*, inter-firm* or interfirm*, interorganis(z)ation* or inter-organis(z)ation*, relationship* or relation*, supply chain*, buyer*, supplier*, B2B*, network*, system*".
These keywords are considered important in capturing constructs in the inter-organizational level (following the study by Delbufalo, 2012).
The searching process was divided into three steps. First, incorporating the inclusion criteria mentioned above yielded 1,737 papers, of which 379 remained after filtering (e.g., management and business, peer-reviewed journals). Second, two of the authors independently read the full abstracts.

Systematic review analysis
Based on our comprehensive analysis and synthesis, we draw out the changes of justice research over the last two decades with a focus on: (i) publication domain; (ii) theories; (iii) methods; and (iv) unit of analysis in extant studies.
We also cover (v) the main themes in inter-organizational research by highlighting the use of different justice dimensions in extant studies, justice dimensions' interactions and their link to performance, as well as finally the prior studies' contexts.

Article classification by journal and research domain
Inter-organizational justice research has appeared in 42 journals across various domains (Table 1). Domains were selected following the Association of Business

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We further classified the articles into five-year time periods to illustrate the evolution over time (Table 2). This chronological analysis showed that justice has initially been considered in an industrial marketing context, and gradually been used as a key mechanism in understanding interactions across other types  Table 2 about here ---

Theories applied in inter-organizational justice research
With regards to adopted theories in prior studies, our analysis (

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The dominance of these theories is based on the need to explain the basis behind partnering organizations' interactions, organizations' desire to mitigate opportunism and uncertainty, and ultimately the costs of governance (Luo et al., 2015). Social exchange theory outlines the context and interaction of the partners, while TCE highlights the nature of the transaction. Table 3 highlights how a justice perspective fits within these theories. Table 3 about here ---

Article classification by research methodologies used
With respect to the adopted research method, our analysis depicted a predominance of empirical over conceptual papers (86% vs. 14%). The analysis of the empirical papers (68 papers) indicates that most selected articles (49) adopted a survey approach. Although the survey approach is useful for examining large population samples (Griffith et al., 2006), a more qualitative approach to the investigation of justice may further uncover the impact of the context, capture the perspectives of the dyad, and highlight differences in perceptions (Eisenhardt, 1989;Liu et al., 2012). The remaining studies adopted various methods including experiments (6), case studies (5), interviews (3), and mixed methods (5). We specifically zoomed in on the chronological distribution of methodologies with an aim to detect publication patterns. This has shown that over the years there has clearly been a dominance of a survey approach to studying justice.

Articles classification by single vs. dyadic focus
Regarding the focus of the identified papers, as Figure

Main themes in inter-organizational justice research
Early scholarly attention (from 1995 to early 2000s) explored the effect of organizational justice in inter-organizational settings on a variety of performance indicators such as relationship quality, commitment, and satisfaction (Gassenheimer, Houston, & Davis, 1998;Kumar et al., 1995). From the mid-2000s onwards, several studies have examined the specific dimensions of justice and how they contribute to relationship management and ultimately performance (e.g. Griffith et al., 2006;Ireland & Webb, 2007;Luo, 2008).
Justice in the context of inter-organizational relationships has been categorized as procedural, distributive, and interactional (Duffy et al., 2013).
Procedural and distributive justice were the first dimensions that were introduced as concepts that helped to explain employees' (or an organization's) perception of justice and how the perception influences performance.
Distributive justice at the inter-organizational level is the perception of how rewards, benefits, or resources are allocated based upon the amount of effort within the relationship; it helps to improve performance by decreasing opportunism (Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001). Procedural justice refers to how the partners guide their interactions through solid formalization and routinized activities designed to reduce overall risk. In contrast to the formal aspects of processes and activities developed between partners, interactional justice emphasizes the social aspects of processes, or the justice of how individuals (boundary-spanners who represent their respective organizations) are treated (Luo, 2008). Finally, considering the context in which prior work studied justice, our analysis indicated that 82% of the papers we reviewed considered a general perspective, which refers mainly to an entity judgment, whereas only thirteen papers investigated justice during specific events such as: alliance formation, trust breach, electronic reverse auction, supplier search and selection, and supplier development process. The trend towards event perception was strongly detected in studies conducted over the last few years.
In summary, we drew out the changes of justice research over the last two decades, and offered insights into justice dimensions in extant studies,

Synthesis and emerging research themes
In order to clarify the state of the art of justice knowledge and pave the way for future research efforts, this section provides a synthesis and critical reflection on the key themes identified by the review and analyses: (i) justice asymmetry; (ii) justice dynamics in inter-organizational relationships, and (iii) multi-level justice.
We also position key research questions and managerial implications (Table 4) which should function as a starting point for future research efforts. Second, procedural justice perception is associated with whether the resource allocation process is compliant with rules of consistency, biassuppression, accuracy, correctability, representativeness, and ethicality (Leventhal, 1980). Procedural justice asymmetry occurs when one party perceives that their counterpart exhibit procedurally inappropriate behavior like altering agreed order quantity, excluding another party in the decision-making process, or intentionally hindering transparency (Liu et al., 2012). Asymmetry in procedural justice could undermine relationship continuity by weakening the existing governance and coordination (Luo, 2008). Prior studies have argued that the weaker party in a relationship may believe that procedures are not just, leading to relationship instability (e.g. Matopoulos, Vlachopoulou, Manthou, & Manos, 2007) and exploitation from the use of coercive power by the more powerful party.

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Lastly, informational injustice reflects partners' awareness of an imbalanced information sharing flow, in which information is injustly distributed, used, and managed in the relationship (Liu et al., 2012). Although complete symmetrical information is difficult for organizations to achieve, organizations strive to reduce information asymmetry to assure the reliability and qualifications of their partnering organizations with respect to the agreed offering (Mascarenhas, Kesavan, & Bernacchi, 2008). One way to reduce information asymmetry which could reduce joint costs (Kim & Netessine, 2013) and improve operational performance (Lawson, Tyler, & Cousins, 2008) is through collaborative efforts by both parties.
In summary, we show that prior literature drew out the prevalence of justice asymmetry and its negative consequences. Accordingly, researchers are encouraged to go beyond the direct effect of justice, and develop frameworks that highlight the types and levels of justice asymmetries, how they emerge, their impact, and the moderating factors that make those asymmetries either beneficial or detrimental to the relationship. For instance, researchers could examine whether the presence of asymmetry invokes a keen awareness of possible exploitation of a particular event, or affect the relationship and its performance in the long-term, identifying another gap in prior literature -the event-entity duality. In other words, this duality is concerned with how the actual perception of justice applied to a particular incident in the relationship influences the perception of justice in the overall relationship life-cycle.

Event -entity duality
Over a relationship's lifecycle, justice perceptions between two partnering organizations can be characterized as a dynamic process of balancing and rebalancing partner's signals (Ambrose & Schminke, 2003). These signals are typically in response to the organizations' interactions which occur on a shortterm basis in reaction to a particular incident, such as delivery conflicts or errors in orders. These are incident-bounded events which are time-and situationdependent (Hollensbe, Khazanchi, & Masterson, 2008). In contrast, these signals accumulate through single events to reflect an overall relationship characteristic such as a commitment to resolve incidents mutually or to share innovation developments. Eventually, partnering organizations tend to form a more stable justice perception, a so-called entity justice perception, through a series of interactions, which tend to persist over time and across events (Zacks & Tversky, 2001) Our literature synthesis showed that the vast majority of prior studies attempted to distill a series of exchanges encounters down to an "entity" perception. Studies captured entity justice perception but did not explicitly differentiate entity from event (e.g. Griffith et al., 2006). Building on work from the intra-organizational justice literature, event and entity justice perceptions are correlated; entity justice could reinforce or undermine event justice perception and vice versa, thereby creating a cyclical pattern (Jones & Skarlicki, 2013). Entity justice represents a context to the assessment of event justice, and in turn event judgements modify the knowledge on which an entity perception is based. Consequently, inter-organizational justice literature has yet to incorporate this event-entity duality both theoretically and empirically.
Building on prior industrial marketing work and IMP in particularly, interorganizational relationships are embedded within surrounding networks  (1999) suggested that supply chain events and their outcomes could be positive or negative. The latter invariably triggers more intense reactions than the former (Taylor, 1991). Other characteristics of the event could include its directness (Jones & Skarlicki, 2013;Roberson, 2006) -whether the event happens within the exchange relationship or within the network. Therefore, we argue that examining different types of events would uncover a more nuanced conceptualization of justice perceptions.

Justice trajectories over time
Our synthesis of extant studies showed that prior literature has recognized that organizations attach different levels of importance to different justice dimensions (Fearne, Duffy, & Hornibrook, 2005;Zaefarian et al., 2016), and drew out a lack of insights with regards to temporal aspects. As exchanges recur over time  Palmatier, Houston, Dant, and Grewal (2013) found that commitment trends (improving or declining) is a strong predictor of future sales growth beyond the actual level of commitment. In another exemplar study, Ta, Esper, Ford, and Garcia-Dastuge (2018) provide evidence of the importance of trustworthiness trends on relationship continuity following a contract breach in financial supply chains.

A multilevel level view of justice
Based on our analyses, organizational justice studies suffer from a lack of multilevel analysis. That is, the literature tends to emphasize only a single level of analysis, overlooking the nested nature of organizational justice (House, Rousseau, & Thomashunt, 1995). Therefore, extant studies generally treat justice at different levels as separate intellectual silos. This is not surprising as a recent review of inter-organizational relationship literature identified a multilevel analysis as a major blind spot (Lumineau & Oliveira, 2018).
Despite rich findings at the micro and macro levels, how one level influences and is influenced by other levels of analysis (as well as their antecedents and consequences) remains unclear (Whitman, Caleo, Carpenter, Horner, & Bernerth, 2012). One exception is the study by Poujol, Siadou-Martin, Vidal, and Pellat (2013) which reported that the perception on the partnering organization's salesperson significantly affects distributive and procedural justice at the inter-organizational level and therefore informs overall satisfaction with the partnering organization. The interactions between personal and organizational levels of analysis and their impact on justice perception and relationship performance are underdeveloped (Lu, 2006). In order to advance this stream of research, the concept of social contagion (and applied specifically to the justice context, justice contagion) developed by Degoey (2000) might prove useful for future research studies.
Justice at the inter-organizational level ultimately relies on individual boundary-spanners to facilitate social and economic exchanges and convey expectations (Perrone, Zaheer, & McEvily, 2003). They also transform their justice perceptions towards the partnering organization into recommended actions initiated by the organization (Luo, 2008). That means, boundaryspanners' perception informs how a collective entity perceives one another in relation to justice and how the collective entity reacts to incidents in a relationship. However, the majority of studies has not, for instance, sampled psychological attributes of the boundary-spanner in relation to organizational justice, in which those attributes are important antecedents to the formation and revision of organizational justice (Cropanzano, Rupp, Mohler, & Schminke, 2001;Henle, 2005).
Additionally, justice at the collective level (e.g. team - Roberson, 2005) is differentially shaped and reshaped by organizational members across organizational levels of hierarchy and with different levels of authority (Sydow & Windeler, 1998). The closest attempt by Lu (2006) showed that the consequences of interactional justice between executive level boundaryspanners in joint ventures buffers the consequences of interactional justice between joint ventures by mitigating the negative impact of cultural differences.
The study measured the consequences of organizational justice (i.e. interactional justice) at the inter-personal and inter-organizational levels, but it did not measure possible justice differences between both levels of analysis. Future studies may seek to measure the differences between justice perception (Chen, Bliese, & Mathieu, 2005).
Overall, our synthesis points to potential contributions that the incorporation of justice can bring to industrial marketing management scholars.
We believe that the concept of justice helps to alleviate the current buyer-centric or one-sided focused research perspective. A number of prior B2B studies assume that the supplier is a passive actor being managed or controlled by an active buyer (Johnsen, 2018). By capturing the dyadic perspective of interorganizational justice, it allows us to identify justice across the dyadic and to draw out potential justice asymmetries. Moreover, in addition to marketing studies focusing on relationship quality attributes such as trust and commitment, a focus on the impact of critical events such as interfirm conflicts or supply chain disruptions on justice over time can further advance our understanding of interorganizational relationship management. These future studies should build on the differentiation between justice perceptions into event and entity duality, providing a temporal perspective of examining dyadic perceptions regarding those immediate events and how these are dealt with (Jones & Skarlicki, 2013) and thus impacting justice perception. Moreover, organizational justice contributes to future industrial marketing studies by highlighting the effect of justice perceptions on a wide array of inter-organizational outcomes such as relationship quality (Gu & Wang, 2011), perceived opportunism (Samaha et al., 2011;Trada & Goyal, 2017), and conflicts (Yang et al., 2012).

Conclusions and implications
Our systematic review indicates that the use of justice at the inter-organizational level has begun to gain momentum in the management literature. Based on our comprehensive analysis and synthesis, we draw out the changes of justice research over the last two decades before offering more insights into extant research with a focus on the use of different justice dimensions in extant studies, the interactions between different justice dimensions, and their link to performance, as well as prior studies' contexts, adopted theories, and methods.
This section acted as foundation for the synthesis part which paved the way for future research avenues, focusing on justice asymmetry, event-entity duality and justice dynamics, as well as the multilevel nature of justice in interorganizational relationships.
Our review sheds light on a number of justice-related issues for practice.
First, organizations may prevent negative relational outcomes by enacting fair practices and by ensuring that their understanding of justice issues are aligned with their partner's perceptions. Not being on the same wavelength may create misunderstandings thereby leading to tensions in the relationship. Second, managers should understand justice both at the level of their individual counterpart but also the justice climate at the organization or network levels.
Finally, managers need to consider trends and histories of justice encounters. In particular, managers should learn to identify event characteristics in order to decrease occurrence of destructive events, and craft appropriate resolution approaches in case they do occur. Moreover, cognizant of how their counterparts are reacting to ongoing experiences over time, managers should avoid deteriorating justice perceptions. If a partnering organization believes that it is treated unfairly, organizations should deploy resources to show that they are improving their justice behavior towards a positive trend. •What are the consequences of justice asymmetries across different interorganizational relationships (such as buyer-supplier and buyer-seller)?
•What are the antecedents of justice asymmetries across different interorganizational relationships (such as buyer-supplier and buyer-seller)?
•Asymmetrical perceptions of justice can lead to inappropriate behavior/relationship outcomes.
• Understanding of the antecedents of justice asymmetries will help managers avoid incongruent justice perceptions with their business partners.
Justice studied at one single point in time looking at either entity or event justice Justice over time •How do changes in justice trends/trajectories impact relationship outcomes such as innovation and relationship satisfaction?
•What event characteristics lead to a reassessment of entity justice perception?
•Managers and organizations need to ensure that justice is improving in the business relationship by better understanding justice trends/trajectories.
• Avoid the occurrence of destructive events and draft appropriate recovery measures in case they occur.

Justice studied at one level of analysis
Multilevel justice •How do factors from different levels impact boundary spanners' justice perceptions?
• How do justice perceptions differ between the individual and organizational levels of •Understanding how justice perceptions are translated from the boundary spanner (e.g. managers at the operational and strategic levels) to the organizational level.
•Insights into how justice perceptions are analysis? formed.

Number of different dimensions of justice
Uni-dimensional Bi-dimensional Tri-dimensional Quad-dimensional