Most organizational justice research investigates supervisor adherence to justice rules as an employee perception to which that employee subsequently reacts. While important, this perception-then-reaction emphasis has left a gap in our understanding of the justice phenomenon. Although we know a lot about how employees react given their perceptions of supervisor adherence to justice rules, in contrast we know quite little about the conditions that influence such adherence in the first place. Given the well-recognized importance of organizational justice, such an omission is surprising as this may curtail both the theoretical development of the literature as well as the ability of scholars to provide practical advice to employees and organizations. To address this, I take an employee-centric focus and apply a political lens to the question of whether supervisors will be more likely to adhere to justice rules toward certain employees. Specifically, I propose that politically skilled employees are treated more fairly by their supervisors as a result of purposeful, motivated behaviors enacted by those employees to influence their received treatment. I furthermore investigate several person- and situation-level boundary conditions to this model and test my hypotheses using a matched sample of 341 employees nested in 86 workgroups recruited from across a variety of occupations and organizations.
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