A Survey Study into Participation in Goal Setting, Fairness and Goal Commitment Effects of Including Multiple Types of Fairness

Building on goal setting and social exchange theory, this study extends prior research about how employee participation in setting annual performance and development goals is related to goal commitment via increased perceptions of fairness, through including other (correlated) types of fairness than typically studied in management accounting research. Survey data are collected from 135 employees and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate participation is directly positively related to goal commitment as well as indirectly via distributive and informational fairness. In addition, the statistical relation between procedural fairness and goal commitment is suppressed: it ranges from significantly positive to significantly negative dependent on what other variables are included in the analyses. As a second contribution, the suppressor phenomenon and its implications are extensively discussed. Suppression mainly occurs when there is much overlap in the independent variables, for instance when multiple control practices are examined simultaneously as systems or packages.