Self-monitoring, status, and justice-related information flow

We develop and test a multi-level interactive model of the relationships among self-monitoring, co-workers' formal and informal status, and justice-related information flow in a scenario-based field study of 4,011 unique relationships collected from 84 respondents. We predict that individuals high in self-monitoring, because they attend more carefully to social cues and have higher levels of expressive control, will be more likely than low self-monitors to intend to seek, accept, and provide justice-related information as a function of their co-workers' formal status, the size of their co-workers' networks, and the advantageousness of their co-workers' position in the networks (betweenness centrality). This cross-level interaction hypothesis receives strong support in terms of co-workers' network size, limited support in terms of co-workers' betweenness centrality, and no support in terms of co-workers' formal status. We address the implications of these findings for the literature on self-monitoring, social construction of organizational justice, and social networks, as well as the strengths and limitations of our approach.