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Senior/Junior Recipient Status and Reward Allocation

Lilavati Krishnan is Professor of Psychology, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Her major area of specialisation is social psychology. Her research interests include prosocial behaviour, child rearing and socialisation, and cross–cultural issues. Of late, she has been working on distributive justice in India.

D.W. Carment

D.W. Carment was Professor, Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada. His research publications are in the areas of game behaviour, coaction, motives for migration, prosocial behaviour, and social justice.

This study examines senior/junior recipient status as a possible determinant of perceived fairness of given allocations and allocation preference. Considering status as a feature associated with the cultural dimension of power distance, female university students from India (a high power distance, relatively collectivistic culture) and Canada (a low power distance, individualistic culture) were compared with regard to perceived fairness and allocation preferences in scenarios involving an organisational or an academic setting, with varying senior/junior recipient status, allocation rule combinations, nature of allocation, and the allocator/recipient role. Overall, recipient status effects were incongruent with the expected power distance differences. Further, Canadians perceived more fairness and less unfairness than Indians. They favoured seniority to a greater extent than Indians, possibly because they treated seniority as a component of merit. Indians manifested an equality orientation, and gave variable responses to seniority depending on the nature of allocation, allocator/recipient role, rule combination and their interactive effects. Allocation preferences were affected more by rule combination than by recipient status in both cultures. The need to examine status effects with a modified research design was underlined.

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