Use of Implicit Measures for Organizational Research: An Empirical Example

An increasing amount of attention is being paid by social and cognitive psychologists to implicit processing, which has ubiquitous effects on attitudes and behaviours. Unfortunately, organizational scholars have tended to focus almost exclusively on explicit processing, which limits understanding of how employees function at work if implicit processing does indeed play a role. In this article, the authors argue that implicit processing is likely prevalent in organizational settings and discuss ways that it can be measured. The authors then present the results of an experiment that suggests that organizational justice-an important work-based variable-has implicit effects on motivation. Moreover, the magnitude of explicit and implicit effects was moderated by need for cognition, a stable individual difference variable. These results support the need to examine implicit processing and its effects in organizations.