“I can’t imagine we’ll be having a beer with the Aussies any time soon,” Brendon McCullum, the English cricket coach, told the BBC after his team’s controversial second test loss in the ongoing Ashes series, bitter after the Bairstow incident.

Recently, when videos of two leading financial services supervisors shouting at their team emerged, many were quick to point out that the culture of those companies was bad. It was said that those organisations promoted winning at any cost and there wasn’t a safety net for hard-working employees there.

Once, when I had to replace my CFO, most of my leadership team was nervous that they would soon be met with a similar fate. It didn’t matter that two of them had just got promoted recently — the perception persisted.

Whether it is sports or the workplace, crying foul has become a habit.

J Stacy Adams, a workplace and behavioural psychologist, tabled the concept of relative deprivation, distributed justice and inequity at workplaces as far back as 1963. Adams asserted that employees seek to maintain equity between the inputs they bring to a job and the outcomes they receive from it against the ‘perceived’ inputs and outputs of others. Perceptions influence the sense of deprivation, fairness and equity.

Relative Deprivation and Equity

Relative deprivation is a term attributed to the authors of The American Soldier, which was published post World War II, to describe disappointments when high expectations are set.

Though Australia won the first test fair and square, a single instance in the second test made Coach McCullum and his entire English supporters feel deprived of fairness. Similarly, the exceptions made by managers in the return-to-office mandate in many organisations is being perceived by many as inequitable.

“Apparently, she has a kid to attend to; I, too, have my parents to look after.”

“I was made to relocate to HQ, whereas he still operates from his hometown” … so the list goes on.

Many situations lead to a sense of inequity. Picture this, a competing employer makes a higher financial offer, and suddenly you start feeling underpaid. You forget that you honed your skills with your current employer and hence are getting higher pay from a competitor who didn’t invest in your learning but is merely going to enjoy the fruits of your upskilled version. As you leave your employer with the thought that you weren’t recognised financially here, you might be inclined to slouch during the notice period.

The Unfair Employer

Every time a new hire is added to the team, the word is out that the person has joined with a higher salary, and the talk of inequity sets in. The manager must invariably fight the perception battle of the competency of the new recruit and also substantiate why they couldn’t elevate someone internally for that role. The argument of paying a higher salary to current employees to be fair to them than waiting for them to resign and then counter-offer is doing the rounds. The logic thrown is that if you are anyhow going to pay 30 per cent higher to the new employee, why not to the loyalists? The most excruciating part of the employer-employee relationship is the constant doubt about perceived inequity in our minds.

The Doubting Thomas

Managers, too, take their time to show faith in their team members. We all have stories about how some of our trusted colleagues cheated us in the past and hurt our reputation in the organisation. But, when you ask people to quantify this, it would be one odd occasion over a long career.

During the peak of hiring in 2021, only a small percentage of employees indulged in moonlighting. However, every employee who went on long leave or took too many offs was suspected by the line managers as a possible moonlighter.

We discriminate while hiring based on certain demographics and ethnicity because someone from those backgrounds had committed an act of folly ages ago. We see them in new people we encounter and say things like, “This guy reminds me of that fraud.”

The Cost of Inequity

We all like to keep away from managers, organisations, founders and team members who, in our perception, have been unfair to us. This feeling of inequity also brings down the productivity of our peers when we gossip and speculate about threats to their psychological safety.

Corporate corridors are often abuzz with whispers like, “The CEO will be sacked; There will be layoffs; hikes and promotions will be frozen this year; they can’t raise funding; they will sell the company; the founders will exit.”

This sense of inequity is a shadow we always carry with us and respond to on a daily basis. We also react to perceived inequity by knowingly reducing the quantity and quality of our efforts and outputs.

Many large organisations have transparent policies and processes that instill fairness in their ecosystem. However, the guardians of those systems are human beings prone to transgressions and every single act of perceived inequity goes viral compared to multiple acts of fairness and there lies the challenge!

(Kamal Karanth is co-founder of Xpheno, a specialist staffing firm)