My son recently took part in a 5-a-side football tournament, with a trophy awarded at the end of the day. There were two groups, A and B, with different referees.

My son’s team did really well and made it through to the semi-final where they got off to a great start with a goal 2 minutes in. They celebrated and high-fived while the other team calmly trotted the ball to the other end of the pitch and put it in the back of the net, right past the goalie who didn’t even try to stop them.

John, the ref, shouted ‘1-1’ and all hell broke loose with players and parents shouting and protesting. Quite quickly I realised what the problem was – there were two rule systems in operation under the two different refs.

With A when a goal was scored the ref sent the ball back to the centre to restart play. With B, John’s system, play continued uninterrupted, because in his view they were only 5 minute matches so there was no point in delaying. The eruption happened because the ball hadn’t gone back to the centre to restart play as my son’s team expected and this change to the rules was patently unfair.

John was incensed by players and parents claiming that he’d been unfair; He hadn’t, he’d applied the rules the same way all day. So he wouldn’t listen.

Meantime, my son’s team abandoned the game, equally incensed and with tears of rage at the injustice. They were ordered back to finish the game, disheartened and upset. The other team was inevitably able to score another goal before the final whistle blew.

At this point, I was forcibly struck by the strength of the reactions to both perceived unfairness and the accusations of being unfair. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the situation, and believe me parents and sons on both sides had very strong views as to what was right and fair, the reactions seemed disproportionate to the offense. My own included. The unfairness sat with me for days and set me thinking about the concept of fairness and how it works.

I do a lot of work in the training room around values and how those values shape our world,  especially in our leadership training. I understand the reaction when someone transgresses our values, particularly our core values – the ones we hold nearest and dearest to our hearts.

What really surprises me is how strongly human beings in general respond to unfairness in any way, shape or form. The reaction goes beyond most other responses to values transgressions and often the scale of the reaction bears little or no relation to the scale of the unfairness.

None of it is life or death, but you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise when you see how people react.

So the really interesting question is why does it seem that way?

Is there an underlying reason related to survival?

Research has found that monkeys will react in a similar way if food is distributed unfairly. So there probably is a primeval response to fairness built into our brains. The interesting thing is that we haven’t abandoned it as we’ve evolved. Nor do we ‘grow out of it’.

This has interesting implications in the workplace, particularly at times of change, when decisions are made that can affect a person’s whole life and livelihood. We’ve delivered many change programmes involving re-organisations and redundancies and people’s abilities to cope differ enormously. One factor that seems to have a big effect is the ‘fairness factor’. People seem better able to cope with difficult decisions if they can understand the rationale and it seems fair and even-handed to them.

An important factor, and one which John ignored, is the effect of having the opportunity to speak out if things seem unfair and feeling that someone is listening, even if the decision can’t be changed. Managers who say

It’s already been decided so there’s no point in discussing it

are missing the point.  People need to vent their feelings around unfairness.

And it seems we want fairness to extend beyond ourselves. Primate research has shown that ideally we want our companions to be treated fairly too. It’s not enough that we’ve kept our jobs when our colleagues are losing theirs in what seems like an arbitrary fashion. So any change management programme has to take into account the impact on morale for those that keep their jobs.

Other factors affect our interpretation of fairness in relation to change, like timing, consistency, likelihood of future gain.

It’s a potential minefield.

Thankfully, the same field of research has also shown that patience has been around even longer than our sense of fairness!

If you’re interested in thinking more about how to cope with change, contact us and ask for our short, readable document on different aspects of change and how you can help yourself through difficult periods of change in your life.