"When people are treated unfairly, for example, when they are not allowed to have input into decisions that will affect them, or when they are not given good explanations of why certain decisions were made, the symbolic message may be that the organization does not think highly enough of them (to provide input or to be given good explanations)."

- Brockner & Sherman, 2019
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308520300058

"Using relevant personal experiences, employees collect information regarding trade-offs between safety and productivity issues, attending mostly to situations presenting a conflict between the two. Practically speaking, if productivity is favored across a variety of situations, implying a higher priority, it will
promote a poor safety climate, leading employees to align their behaviors accordingly."

- Zohar & Polachek, 2014 (cited in the above; this paper is https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-28923-001 )

The overall literature on how employees contextualize and interpret trade-offs between potentially conflicting goals seems like...a big one for software to start to understand better. Safety/productivity trade-offs and conflicts are well studied in other areas, and there are even tested interventions -- e.g., improving the communication between management and direct reports in manufacturing! I suppose software considers itself above such areas of psychology

"Messages from managers are impactful not only during the hiring process, but also throughout employees’ tenure. Managerial trickle-down effects have been found in several literatures in organizational behavior (e.g., Wo, Ambrose, & Schminke, 2015), which show that managers at lower levels tend to treat their direct reports similarly to how they have been treated by their own bosses." - Brockner & Sherman, 2019, again

"one way to fulfill the promise of onboarding employees in a self-affirming way is for organizations to allow for job crafting (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001), which refers to employee-initiated changes in how they do their work."
- Brockner & Sherman

I've been noodling on this for a long while, since thinking about the role Agency plays in Developer Thriving (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10491133 ) -- it would be cool to measure how much job crafting folks feel like they have or don't have on software teams

There are however two sides to this -- much research on organizational fairness concentrates entirely on the "top-down and static approach" (Brockner & Sherman, 2019) of how managers impact their direct reports, but not how direct reports influence their managers. Particularly in knowledge work where technical credibility testing is high, I believe those bidirectional relationships are very impactful. Vicious or virtuous cycles make all the difference

This is good for individuals, not just organizations: for example when individuals are able to exercise compassionate interpretations of their managers ("perhaps my boss never had the training to deal with this situation and he doesn't have the information I have") they are more likely to intervene, self-advocate, and also suffer fewer harms to themselves because being able to go through reappraisal can de-escalate the stress and burden of a situation (https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-45081-001)