Looking Ahead in Times of Uncertainty: The Role of Anticipatory Justice in an Organizational Change Context Jessica B. Rodell and Jason A. Colquitt University of Florida Our study drew on past theorizing on anticipatory justice (D. L. Shapiro & B. L. Kirkman, 2001) and fairness heuristic theory (K. Van den Bos, E. A. Lind, & H. A. M. Wilke, 2001) to build and test a model of employee reactions to a smoking ban. The results of a longitudinal study in a hospital showed that employee levels of preban anticipatory justice were predicted by their global sense of their supervisor’s fairness. The combination of anticipatory justice and global supervisory fairness then predicted the experienced justice of the ban 3 months after its implementation, with the effects of the 2 predictors dependent on perceptions of uncertainty and outcome favorability regarding the ban. Finally, experienced (interpersonal) justice predicted significant other ratings of employee support for the ban. Keywords: justice, fairness, organizational change Change is a natural component of employees’ working lives (Leana & Barry, 2000; Piderit, 2000). Employees may experience a variety of changes during their organizational tenure, ranging from large-scale changes such as organizational relocations (Daly & Geyer, 1994) or mergers (Schweiger & Denisi, 1991), to new policies such as smoking bans (Greenberg, 1994) or pay freezes (Schaubroeck, May, & Brown, 1994). Past research has illustrated the impact of organizational change on employee attitudes and behaviors, including job satisfaction, organizational commitment, turnover intentions, job performance, and theft (Fedor, Caldwell, & Herold, 2006; Greenberg, 1990; Kickul, Lester, & Finkl, 2002; Schaubroeck et al., 1994). Given its impact on such outcomes, understanding how employees react to organizational change re- mains an important area of study. Regardless of the nature of organizational changes, employees may cope with their inherent uncertainty by anticipating how fairly changes will be handled. For example, Kirkman, Shapiro, Novelli, and Brett (1996) showed that employees who were about to experience a team-based reorganization formed perceptions about how fairly they felt the change would be handled. Shapiro and Kirkman (1999, 2001) introduced the anticipatory justice construct to reflect such perceptions, defining anticipatory justice as expec- tations regarding whether one will (or will not) experience justice in the context of some future event. The anticipatory adjective conveys that justice is being foreseen—that employees are sensing it beforehand (Shapiro & Kirkman, 2001). Other scholars have used the term justice expectations in subsequent work to capture these same sorts of anticipations (Bell, Ryan, & Wiechmann, 2004; Bell, Wiechmann, & Ryan, 2006). Like the experienced justice that is typically assessed in the justice literature, anticipatory justice can be conceptualized along specific dimensions. Procedural justice refers to the perceived fairness of decision-making procedures, with individuals assessing the extent to which procedures are consistent, bias free, accurate, correctable, ethical, and amenable to input (Leventhal, 1980; Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Interpersonal justice refers to the degree of respect and concern supervisors show when communicating with employees, and informational justice reflects the extent to which supervisors provide honest justifications when implement- ing procedures (Bies & Moag, 1986; Greenberg, 1993). Distribu- tive justice refers to the perceived fairness of decision outcomes, determined by comparing one’s perceived ratio of outcomes with inputs to the ratio of a comparison other (Adams, 1965; Leventhal, 1976). The effects of anticipatory justice have begun to be examined in a handful of empirical studies (Bell et al., 2006; Ritter, Fischbein, & Lord, 2005; Shapiro & Kirkman, 1999), and some of these studies have explored anticipatory justice in the context of an organizational change (Bell et al., 2006; Shapiro & Kirkman, 1999). These studies support the notion that anticipatory justice is distinct from experienced justice and that anticipatory justice im- pacts reactions to change (Bell et al., 2006; Shapiro & Kirkman, 1999). However, there is still much that it is not known about anticipatory justice. For example, it remains unclear how percep- tions of anticipatory justice are initially formed, how and when anticipatory justice impacts experienced justice, and what role a supervisor’s past “justice reputation” plays in such judgments. It also remains unclear how anticipatory justice fits with the models and theories used to organize the mainstream justice literature. Without answers to such questions, it becomes difficult to under- stand exactly how justice impacts participants’ ultimate support for an organizational change effort. With these questions in mind, the purpose of this study was to build and test a model of anticipatory justice in the context of one specific organizational change: a smoking ban in a hospital system. We built our model by pairing Shapiro and Kirkman’s (2001) seminal theorizing on anticipatory justice with fairness heuristic theory, a theory in the broader justice literature that focuses on the Jessica B. Rodell and Jason A. Colquitt, Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jessica B. Rodell, Warrington College of Business Administration, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. E-mail: jessica.rodell@cba.ufl.edu Journal of Applied Psychology © 2009 American Psychological Association 2009, Vol. 94, No. 4, 989 –1002 0021-9010/09/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0015351 989