Teachers’ legitimacy: effects of justice perception and social comparison processes

Abstract

Background: Teachers' legitimacy is central to school functioning. Teachers' justice, whether distributive or procedural, predicts teachers' legitimacy. Aims: What is still do be found, and constitutes the goal of this paper, is whether unjust treatment by a teacher affects the legitimacy of the teacher differently when the student knows that the teacher was fair to a peer (comparative judgement) or when the student does not have that information (autonomous judgement). Samples: A total of 79 high school students participated in Study 1; 75 high school students participated in Study 2. Methods: Two experimental studies with a 2 justice valence (just, unjust) × 2 social comparison processes (autonomous judgements, comparative judgements) between-participants design were conducted. Study 1 addressed distributive justice and Study 2 addressed procedural justice. The dependent variable was teachers' legitimacy. Results: In both studies, situations perceived as just led to higher teachers' legitimacy than situations perceived as unjust. For the distributive injustice conditions, teachers' legitimacy was equally lower for autonomous judgement and comparative judgement conditions. For procedural injustice, teachers' legitimacy was lower when the peer was treated justly and the participant was treated unfairly, compared with the condition when the participants did not know how the teacher treated the peer. Conclusions: We conclude that teachers' injustice affects teachers' legitimacy, but it does it differently according to the social comparisons involved and the type of justice involved. Moreover, these results highlight that social comparisons are an important psychological process and, therefore, they should be taken into account in models of justice.