title: Coworkers’ fairness perceptions of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals)
title: Three essays on coworkers’ fairness perceptions of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals)
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Gachayeva, Sona
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 2024
Subjects: subject: I-deals
subject: coworkers’ fairness perceptions
subject: i-deal implementation
subject: Idiosyncratic Deals

description: As idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) gain increased importance in the evolved employment landscape, their implications for employees and organizations have garnered significant attention. While i-deals are practical for managing dynamic work environments, they also introduce challenges. A primary concern with i-deals is their potential to create disparities in employment conditions within a group, thereby risking a significant impact on coworkers' fairness perceptions. Current literature predominantly focuses on the immediate equity and comparative concerns arising from i-deals amongst coworkers. However, this perspective may not sufficiently capture the complexity of coworkers’ fairness perceptions of i-deals. This thesis contends that coworkers' fairness perceptions of i-deals are closely tied to their implementation, particularly in addressing coworkers' various justice concerns. This thesis makes a substantial contribution to the existing literature by theoretically expanding and empirically demonstrating how coworkers' fairness perceptions of i-deals are shaped through the following three papers: Paper One (Chapter Two) employs explanatory theorizing to explore coworkers’ fairness perceptions of i-deals conceptually. It integrates i-deal literature with organizational justice literature to argue that the implementation of i-deals plays a critical role in shaping coworkers’ fairness perceptions of i-deals. An extensive synthesis of existing i-deal literature conceptualizes the i-deal implementation into four distinct stages: negotiation, allocation, communication, and consequences. Building on organizational justice literature, it explores their distinctive impact on coworkers' fairness perceptions of i-deals. This study contributes to the i-deal literature by shifting the focus toward the implementation of i-deals to understand coworkers' fairness perceptions of these arrangements and, thus, introduces a novel approach to explore these perceptions. Paper Two (Chapter Three) employs an inductive multiple case study qualitative study to explore coworkers’ fairness perceptions of i-deals focusing on i-deal implementation and related justice concerns of coworkers. It reveals key factors associated with the four stages of i-deal implementation that influence coworkers’ fairness perceptions of i-deals and induce both negative and positive perceptions of i-deal. This paper contributes an empirically driven perspective to i-deal literature to understand the third-party fairness implications of i-deals. Paper Three (Chapter Four) utilizes a web-based experimental factorial survey to examine the distinctive influence of key factors, specifically, the performance of i-dealers, the communication of i-deals, and the consequences of i-deals associated with allocation, communication, and consequences stages of i-deal implementation on coworkers' perceptions of fairness. This examination extends to assessing the collective impact of these factors on coworkers' overall justice perceptions and the subsequent individual-level effects emanating from these justice perceptions related to i-deals. This study demonstrates that different stages of i-deal implementation, specifically allocation, communication, and consequences, individually and collectively affect coworkers' perceptions of justice, leading to subsequent employee outcomes.