Fairness refers to employees' judgments of the appropriateness of outcomes, processes, and the treatment they receive in the workplace. While managers often recognize the importance of fairness and are motivated to act fairly in the abstract, employees often experience unfair treatment. I am interested in understanding the reasons for the gap between managers' intentions and employees' experiences, as well as the structural and perceptual barriers to fair treatment.

For instance, my research demonstrates that given high workloads and organizational reward structures that predominantly emphasize the bottom line and technical performance, managers are often forced to prioritize work tasks over acting fairly towards their employees. My work also highlights the perceptual barriers managers face, such as lack of attention and lack of information, and suggests that to be perceived as fair, managers need to facilitate an ongoing process of learning about employees' unique views and experiences. Additionally, I found that judgments of fairness depend not only on managers' actions, but also on employees' attributions as to why their managers attempt to act fairly. Specifically, managers who are seen as prosocial are judged as fairer even when they fail to engage in behaviors that are often equated with fairness judgments, whereas managers who are seen as self-interested are judged even more negatively when they fail to engage in such behaviors.

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In other work, I explore what explains people's divergent judgments of the fairness of similar situations or actions. For instance, I find that employees evaluate the fairness of the same inequitable scenario differently depending on whether the co-worker is a close personal friend or someone they highly dislike. Additionally, I examine how fairness intersects with structural biases against women, illustrating whether and when attempts to account for structural sexism when allocating resources are deemed fair. Beyond extending fairness theory, this research highlights managers' pivotal role as lynchpins in challenging structural inequities at work.