Extant research on workplace justice mainly discussed how fairly an individual employee is treated and how he or she reciprocally responds to this treatment. In this study, we focus on the effects of individual team member’s perception on how fairly his or her team is treated (i.e., perception of between-team distributive justice) on their within-team helping behaviors. Drawing upon social identity theory, we propose that employees’ perception of between-team distributive justice could influence their identification with the team, which further leads to their within-team helping behavior. In addition, the perception of within-team distributive justice moderates the aforementioned relationship such that when within-team distributive justice perception is high, the effects of between-team distributive justice perception on within-team helping, via team identification, become stronger. Results of a time-lagged survey and an experiment both support our hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed.
