The Influence Mechanism of Stakeholder Fairness Perception on Voluntary Contribution Behavior

Research in Organizational Behavior and Stakeholder Governance

Paper I of the Series · Employees and Teams

The Influence Mechanism of Stakeholder

Fairness Perception on Voluntary

Contribution Behavior

The Mediating Role of Trust

Andrew David W.Y.

WISERUNION / weitengfei.com

Grok

xAI

Corresponding author: Andrew David W.Y.

September 2026

Note on the Manuscript

This is the first paper in a planned series. The unit of analysis is employees and teams. The preferred empirical path is a multi-wave, multi-source design. The explanatory task is to show why individuals continue to make voluntary contributions after current compensation has already been paid. The manuscript develops the theory, defines the constructs, derives testable hypotheses, and specifies an executable research design. Because field data have not yet been collected, the paper does not report fabricated statistical results. Hypothesis tests should proceed only after data are gathered under the protocol in Sections 4 and 5.

Abstract

Sustained firm growth depends on employees and teams continuing to contribute knowledge, collaboration, innovation, and relationship maintenance beyond formal duties. Prior research shows that organizational justice predicts organizational citizenship behavior, yet most studies still treat employees primarily as internal subordinates. Fewer studies explain, from the standpoint of participants in a cooperative scheme, why people keep making hard-to-price voluntary contributions after current compensation has already been paid. This paper links Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness with the literatures on organizational justice, social exchange, and organizational trust, and proposes a mechanism of stakeholder fairness perception → trust → voluntary contribution behavior.

Stakeholder fairness perception is defined as employees’ integrated judgment of whether the outcomes, procedures, and interpersonal treatment they receive as co-creators are just. Voluntary contribution behavior is defined as ongoing extra-contractual input that helps form the organization’s long-term capabilities. Trust is differentiated into cognition-based and affect-based trust, with both organization-focused and supervisor-focused referents. The paper advances seven testable hypotheses and specifies a three-wave, multi-source, employee–supervisor matched and cross-level design. The intended contributions are to recast fairness as a basis of claims in a co-creation order, to treat voluntary contribution as a micro-foundation of stakeholder capital formation, and to specify trust as the relational mechanism that converts fairness perceptions into continued input. Managerial implications, boundary conditions, and criteria for falsification are discussed.

Keywords: stakeholder fairness; voluntary contribution behavior; organizational trust; social exchange; stakeholder capital; multi-wave multi-source design

1. Introduction

Any institution that seeks to organize co-creation must answer a question that looks ordinary and has remained incomplete: why do people continue to contribute? Employees who fulfill job duties have already received wages, benefits, and performance pay. Suppliers who deliver under contract have already been paid. Customers who purchase have already received a product or service. If cooperation stopped at these contemporaneous clearances, firms could still operate, but they would struggle to accumulate capabilities that outlast the current period. What often forms an organization’s longer-term strength is input that is not priced at once and does not necessarily enter the current appraisal cycle: passing experience to colleagues, closing process gaps without being asked, protecting customer trust after a setback, finishing an improvement that has not yet been recognized, and continuing firm-specific investment under uncertainty.

In organizational behavior, such actions are usually classified as organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), extra-role behavior, or proactive behavior. The literature already offers fairly stable evidence: higher perceived justice is associated with more citizenship; trust, perceived organizational support, and leader–member exchange often serve as social-exchange mechanisms.[1][2][3] That tradition is important. It still leaves three gaps that prevent a full answer to why individuals keep contributing.

First, the theoretical place of fairness remains too narrow. Most studies treat fairness as an attitudinal evaluation of pay, procedures, and supervisory treatment. Fewer treat it as a normative judgment inside a cooperative scheme: whether participants believe they are being treated, as parties to co-creation, in proportion to contribution, responsibility, and risk. Phillips argues that when persons voluntarily accept the benefits of a mutually beneficial scheme of cooperation that requires sacrifice or contribution, and free-riding is possible, obligations of fairness arise.[4][5] Fairness is therefore not only a source of satisfaction in human resource management. It is a condition under which a co-creation order can stand.

Second, the concept of contribution remains too short. OCB captures discretionary conduct that helps the organization function. It does not necessarily capture conduct that can form long-term capital. A one-off favor or a polite refusal to complain is not the same, in governance terms, as continued investment of hard-to-transfer knowledge, relationships, or innovative effort. Stakeholder capital theory treats the latter as a micro-foundation of capital formation: co-creation becomes capital only when contribution is absorbed by the organization, sustained through collaboration, and turned into capabilities that travel beyond the current period.[6]

Third, tests of mechanism still confuse association with sequence. A large share of justice–OCB studies use same-wave, same-source self-reports. Common method variance and reversed timing can inflate mediation. If the aim is to explain continued contribution, fairness perception, the formation of trust, and later behavior must be measured apart, and behavior should be rated by informed others. That is why this paper adopts a multi-wave, multi-source path.

The paper therefore focuses on employees and teams and asks: how does employees’ stakeholder fairness perception affect voluntary contribution behavior through trust? Four tasks follow. First, stakeholder fairness perception is distinguished from generic organizational justice by its cooperative-scheme referent and its meaning as a basis of claims. Second, voluntary contribution is specified beyond OCB as relational, institutional, and developmental contribution. Third, trust is placed as the mediator and is split into cognition-based and affect-based trust, with organization and supervisor as referents. Fourth, the paper specifies a three-wave, employee–supervisor matched design nested in teams, so that later empirical work can actually serve the question of why individuals continue to contribute.

2. Theoretical Background and Literature

2.1 From Organizational Justice to Stakeholder Fairness

Organizational justice research commonly distinguishes distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. Distributive justice concerns whether outcomes are proportional to inputs and traces to Adams’s equity theory. Procedural justice concerns whether rules are consistent, representative, and correctable. Interactional justice, often split into interpersonal and informational justice, concerns respectful treatment and adequate explanation.[7][8][9][10] Meta-analyses by Colquitt and colleagues show that the dimensions are strongly related yet have incremental validity, and that justice has stable positive relations with citizenship and task performance, with social-exchange quality as an important mediating path.[1][2]

This tradition supplies workable measures. It is not, by itself, enough to carry the construct of stakeholder fairness. Organizational justice usually takes the firm and its internal employees as the implicit pair. Stakeholder theory treats the firm as a network of multilateral value creation and exchange.[11][12][13] Phillips’s principle of stakeholder fairness moves fairness from an internal managerial attitude to an obligation of cooperation: those who voluntarily accept the benefits of a mutually beneficial scheme owe a contribution proportionate to the benefits accepted; the scheme, in turn, must treat those participants fairly.[4][5] Harrison, Bosse, and Phillips further argue that managing for stakeholders on principles of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice helps build trust, reveal stakeholder utility functions, and create additional value.[14]

Stakeholder fairness perception is therefore not a relabeling of a justice questionnaire. It comprises three judgments. At the distributive layer: are my rewards, recognition, and development opportunities proportionate to my contribution, responsibility, and risk in the joint undertaking? At the procedural layer: are contribution recognition, dispute handling, and rule revision consistent, predictable, and open to contestation? At the interactional layer: am I respected, informed, and taken seriously as a co-creator, rather than treated as replaceable labor or a cost item? These layers map onto classic justice dimensions, but the referent is no longer only “is the employer fair to the employee?” It is “does this joint undertaking treat me justly as a participant?”

Two consequences follow. First, payment of wages does not automatically close the fairness question. Wages settle the job contract. Fairness perception concerns treatment that the contract has not exhausted. Second, unfairness does more than lower satisfaction. It weakens the willingness to place firm-specific input in the organization’s hands. Voluntary contribution is often irreversible, hard to price, and hard to withdraw at once. Participants must first judge whether the other party remains worth trusting with that vulnerability.

2.2 Voluntary Contribution Behavior: A Governance Meaning beyond Citizenship

Organ defined OCB as discretionary conduct that is not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system and that, in the aggregate, promotes the effective functioning of the organization, with dimensions such as altruism, conscientiousness, sportsmanship, courtesy, and civic virtue.[15] Williams and Anderson distinguished citizenship directed at individuals (OCB-I) from citizenship directed at the organization (OCB-O).[16] Research in Chinese settings has added locally inflected dimensions such as identification with the company, altruism toward colleagues, conscientiousness, interpersonal harmony, and protecting company resources.[17] These studies provide a reliable measurement starting point.

This paper still uses the term voluntary contribution behavior rather than equating it with OCB, in order to mark three governance differences. First, the time structure differs. Citizenship can be a one-off, situational help. Voluntary contribution emphasizes input that recurs in repeated cooperation and can be absorbed by the organization. Second, the capital meaning differs. Not every extra-role act forms long-term capability. Only when input enters knowledge, relationships, processes, or reputation, and continues to work in later tasks, does it approach the capital-formation conditions set out in stakeholder capital theory.[6] Third, the risk structure differs. Voluntary contribution often carries specificity: teaching a team a critical know-how, converting personal client ties into organizational assets, or persisting with an improvement outside the appraisal window all raise the risk of appropriation or neglect. Such acts therefore depend more on fairness and trust than ordinary courtesy.

Employee voluntary contribution is accordingly operationalized in three related dimensions. Relational contribution is directed at colleagues and the team: knowledge sharing, unprompted coverage, conflict mediation, and mentoring. Institutional contribution is directed at organizational functioning: upholding rules, proposing process fixes, protecting common resources, and taking part in collective affairs. Developmental contribution is directed at future capability: innovative trial without full extra reward, cross-unit coordination, customer co-creation, and continued effort on uncertain projects. The three dimensions can be mapped onto OCB-I, OCB-O, and proactive innovation, but analysis should keep asking whether the behavior helps co-creation continue, not merely whether it improves the present climate.

2.3 Trust: From Perceived Justice to a Relationship That Can Be Entrusted

Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman define trust as the willingness to be vulnerable to another party based on positive expectations of that party’s intentions and behavior, even without monitoring.[18] Rousseau and colleagues treat trust as a psychological state of accepted vulnerability.[19] McAllister distinguishes cognition-based trust, grounded in evidence of ability, reliability, and integrity, from affect-based trust, grounded in care and emotional ties.[20] Meta-analyses by Dirks and Ferrin and by Colquitt and colleagues show that trust is positively related to citizenship and task performance and can mediate the effects of leadership and just treatment.[3][21]

In a stakeholder frame, trust has a clearer institutional function. Much co-creative input cannot be verified at the moment it is given. Participants must first believe that contribution will be recorded rather than absorbed in silence, that rules will not be rewritten after results appear, and that the other party will not opportunistically take advantage of exposed vulnerability. What Harrison and colleagues call managing for stakeholders works, in part, by building trust through justice principles and then using that trust to obtain deeper cooperative knowledge.[14] Stakeholder capital theory likewise treats credible commitment, reciprocal expectation, and relationship repair as conditions of continued input.[6]

Trust is therefore treated as the key mediator that turns fairness perception into voluntary contribution, not as a second independent variable standing beside fairness. Fairness perception evaluates treatment that has already occurred. Voluntary contribution is risk-taking toward the future. Between them there must be an expectation about future conduct. Trust is the relational form of that expectation. Without trust, a fairness judgment may stop at “this time was reasonably just.” With trust, participants become willing to deliver yet-unpriced effort to the joint undertaking in advance.

2.4 Social Exchange and Fair Play: Two Sources of Mechanism

Social exchange theory supplies the first chain. Blau distinguished economic exchange, which relies on specified and contemporaneous consideration, from social exchange, which relies on unspecified obligations and long-term reciprocity.[22] Cropanzano and Mitchell note that just treatment is an important antecedent of high-quality social exchange, with trust, commitment, and support as core indicators of exchange quality.[23] When employees see the organization treating them fairly, they are more likely to construe the relationship as social exchange and to repay it with extra-role contribution. That accounts for the basic direction of fairness → trust → contribution.

The principle of fair play supplies a second chain, closer to stakeholder theory. The principle Phillips draws on holds that once a mutually beneficial cooperative scheme is voluntarily accepted, participants may not take the benefits while refusing the corresponding contribution; at the same time, the scheme must treat contributors fairly, or else the normative basis of cooperative obligation collapses.[4][5] This principle helps explain two facts that social exchange alone does not handle cleanly. First, why some people continue to contribute when short-term returns are not generous: they understand the organization as a scheme they already inhabit, not only as a sequence of spot trades. Second, why unfairness can quickly dissolve voluntary contribution: unfairness does not merely reduce the wish to reciprocate; it puts the legitimacy of the scheme in doubt, so that continued contribution looks like subsidizing free-riding.

The two lines should be joined rather than substituted for each other. Social exchange explains the motive of reciprocity. Fair play explains cooperative obligation and the legitimacy of the scheme. For employees, trust carries both the expectation that “the other party will repay me” and the judgment that “this joint undertaking is still worth maintaining.” That is why the paper uses trust as the mediator rather than organizational identification or job satisfaction alone. Identification can explain belonging. Satisfaction can explain affect. Only trust jointly contains expectations of ability, integrity, and benevolence, and therefore comes closer to the vulnerability that voluntary contribution requires.

3. Research Model and Hypotheses

3.1 Overall Model

The paper proposes a temporally ordered mediation model: stakeholder fairness perception at Time 1 affects voluntary contribution behavior at Time 3 through trust at Time 2. Fairness perception includes distributive, procedural, and interactional dimensions. Trust includes cognition-based and affect-based trust, each referenced to the organization and to the immediate supervisor. Voluntary contribution includes relational, institutional, and developmental dimensions. Team fairness climate enters as a team-level contextual variable, in keeping with the employee-and-team unit of analysis. Controls include demographics, tenure, job type, pay level, leader–member exchange, perceived organizational support, team size, and task interdependence.

Table 1. Structure of Variables in the Research Model

Note: Recommended intervals between T1, T2, and T3 are four to six weeks. Supervisor ratings and employee self-reports cover the same work cycle but are administered separately.

3.2 Main Effects and Mediation

Stakeholder fairness perception and voluntary contribution

When employees judge that outcomes are proportionate to contribution, responsibility, and risk; that procedures recognize contribution and handle disputes consistently; and that interaction treats them as co-creators rather than as cost items, the expected loss from further input falls. Developmental contribution depends especially on this judgment because it is the hardest to settle in the current period. Meta-analytic evidence already supports a positive justice–citizenship relation.[1][2] Extending that relation to stakeholder fairness and voluntary contribution yields:

Hypothesis 1. Employees’ stakeholder fairness perception is positively related to their voluntary contribution behavior.

Hypotheses 1a–1c. Distributive, procedural, and interactional fairness perceptions are each positively related to voluntary contribution behavior.

Fairness perception and trust

Just outcomes supply evidence of ability and benevolence. Just procedures supply evidence of integrity and predictability. Just interaction supplies evidence of respect and emotional safety. These forms of evidence nourish cognition-based and affect-based trust respectively.[18][20][14] Procedural fairness should be especially predictive of organization-focused cognition-based trust, because rule stability is a judgment about institutions rather than persons. Interactional fairness should be especially predictive of supervisor-focused affect-based trust, because everyday treatment is largely delivered by the immediate supervisor.

Hypothesis 2. Employees’ stakeholder fairness perception is positively related to their trust in the organization and in the supervisor.

Hypothesis 2a. The positive effect of procedural fairness perception is stronger for organization-focused cognition-based trust than for affect-based trust.

Hypothesis 2b. The positive effect of interactional fairness perception is stronger for supervisor-focused affect-based trust than for cognition-based trust.

Trust and voluntary contribution

Trust reduces the need for monitoring and makes employees willing to act before contribution is fully recognized.[18][19] Cognition-based trust mainly lowers the estimated risk that the other party is incompetent or unreliable, and therefore supports institutional and developmental contribution that require professional judgment. Affect-based trust mainly lowers the estimated risk of being treated badly, and therefore supports relational contribution that requires interpersonal exposure. Colquitt and colleagues find a robust association between trust and citizenship.[21]

Hypothesis 3. Employees’ trust is positively related to their voluntary contribution behavior.

Hypothesis 3a. The positive effect of cognition-based trust is stronger for institutional and developmental contribution than for relational contribution.

Hypothesis 3b. The positive effect of affect-based trust is stronger for relational contribution than for institutional contribution.

The mediating role of trust

Fairness perception evaluates treatment that has already occurred. Voluntary contribution delivers input that is not yet fully protected. Trust translates “whether the past was just” into “whether the future can be entrusted.” Colquitt and colleagues’ 2013 meta-analysis shows that indicators of social-exchange quality, including trust, mediate justice–citizenship relations, and that this mediation does not strictly obey a target-matching rule.[2] The paper therefore expects partial mediation: fairness may still affect contribution through obligation or positive affect, but trust should constitute an identifiable indirect path.

Hypothesis 4. Trust mediates the relationship between stakeholder fairness perception and voluntary contribution behavior.

Hypothesis 4a. Organization-focused trust mediates the relationships of procedural fairness perception with institutional and developmental contribution.

Hypothesis 4b. Supervisor-focused trust mediates the relationship between interactional fairness perception and relational contribution.

3.3 Team-Level Extension: Fairness Climate and Cross-Level Effects

Individual judgments sit inside everyday team life. When team members generally see contribution recognition, task assignment, and acknowledgment as just, a fairness climate forms. That climate supplies social information, so that individuals may decide whether to keep contributing even when their own history is still thin. It also constrains free-riding: in a high-fairness climate, privately appropriating collective contribution is harder to rationalize. Although the core mechanism is individual, the team remains part of the research unit.

Hypothesis 5. Team fairness climate is positively related to individual voluntary contribution behavior and positively moderates the relationship between individual fairness perception and trust: the higher the climate, the stronger the translation of individual fairness perception into trust.

The opposite moderation is also possible and should be registered in advance: in a low-fairness climate, an individual who is still treated justly may show a sharper rise in trust because of contrast. Both possibilities belong in the preregistration. The data, not a post hoc narrative, should decide between them.

3.4 Competitive Mediators and Discriminant Validity

To avoid writing trust as a variable that mediates everything, the model should include perceived organizational support, affective commitment, and job satisfaction as competitive mediators. Only if the indirect effect of trust remains significant after these variables are controlled can one say with more confidence that the mechanism is an entrusted relationship rather than merely a better mood or stronger identification. Voluntary contribution should also be distinguished from task performance, so that supervisors do not simply award a halo to “good employees.”

Hypothesis 6. After perceived organizational support, affective commitment, and job satisfaction are entered simultaneously, the mediating effect of trust in the fairness–contribution relationship remains significant.

Hypothesis 7. Voluntary contribution behavior has incremental explanatory power for subsequent team performance and employees’ intention to remain, and this effect is not fully accounted for by task performance. Hypothesis 7 is a criterion-related validity check, not a necessary condition of the core model.

4. Method

4.1 Overall Strategy

The preferred path is a multi-wave, multi-source study. First, temporal separation: T1 measures fairness perception and controls; T2 measures trust and competitive mediators; T3 obtains supervisor ratings of voluntary contribution and task performance, with intervals of four to six weeks. Second, source separation: predictors and mediators come from employees; the dependent variable comes from supervisors; team climate is aggregated from at least three members of each team. Third, nested matching: employees are nested in supervisors or teams and analyzed with multilevel models. Fourth, preregistration: hypotheses, exclusion rules, aggregation standards, and the mediation protocol are registered before data lock.

The design is meant to honor the temporal meaning of continued contribution. If fairness, trust, and contribution are completed by the same person on the same afternoon, the study can show only that the three covary. It cannot show why people, after experiencing just treatment, still choose the next period’s input. Multiple waves do not automatically prove causation. They do constrain direction to the order the theory requires and reduce shared variance produced by momentary affect.

4.2 Sample and Sampling

Sampling is recommended in two to four firms with stable team structures in knowledge- or service-intensive work, covering research and development, operations, marketing, and professional support. The target is at least 80 teams, three to eight members per team, and at least 400 successfully matched employee–supervisor cases. A priori power analysis should take a medium indirect effect (standardized indirect effect of about 0.08 to 0.12) as the benchmark and reserve 20 to 30 percent attrition under multilevel conditions.

Inclusion criteria: at least three months in the current post, a clearly identified immediate supervisor, and an observation window in which that supervisor can see the employee’s work. Exclusion criteria: abnormally short completion time, failed attention checks, fewer than two ratees per supervisor, and fewer than three valid responses per team. All participants give informed consent. Data are analyzed after de-identification. Firms receive only aggregate patterns, not identifiable individual results, in order to reduce evaluation apprehension.

4.3 Measures

All scales use a six-point Likert format to reduce midpoint clustering common in some survey settings. Items should be translated and back-translated where needed, then checked for wording and reliability in a pretest of 30 to 50 respondents. Recommended sources are as follows.

Table 2. Measurement Sources and Adaptation Principles

Note: Stakeholder fairness perception should be examined as both a first-order three-factor model and a second-order overall factor. If the second-order model fits acceptably, the main hypotheses may use the overall factor; dimensional hypotheses still use first-order factors.

Illustrative items for stakeholder fairness perception

Distributive fairness: “Relative to my actual contribution to the team’s results, the recognition I receive is fair.” “Relative to the downside risk I bear, the protection I receive is fair.” Procedural fairness: “The standards this team uses to recognize contribution are consistent over time.” “If I believe my contribution has been undercounted, there is an appeal path I can actually use.” “When rules that affect rewards are to be changed, the change is explained in advance and those affected are heard.” Interactional fairness: “My supervisor treats me as a participant in co-creation, not merely as someone who executes instructions.” “Decisions that concern me are explained in a timely and understandable way.” These items are not the final instrument. Loadings, cross-loadings, and cognitive interviews after the pretest should govern deletion and revision.

Illustrative supervisor items for voluntary contribution

Relational contribution: “This employee shares useful experience with colleagues even when doing so does not raise his or her appraisal score.” “When a colleague is blocked, this employee provides substantive help after finishing his or her own tasks.” Institutional contribution: “This employee identifies and helps repair gaps in shared processes.” “This employee intervenes when collective resources are being harmed.” Developmental contribution: “This employee advances improvements that matter for the future even without a clear extra reward.” “This employee is willing to take on tasks whose results are still uncertain but that help organizational capability.” Four to five items per dimension are recommended. Items should not rewrite “pleasant personality” or “compliance” as contribution.

4.4 Common Method Variance, Social Desirability, and Evaluation Apprehension

Procedural controls include a cover statement that there are no right answers and that responses will not be used for individual rewards or sanctions; mixed positively and negatively worded items; physical separation of T1 through T3; and supervisor completion of the dependent variable. Statistical controls include Harman’s single-factor test only as a preliminary diagnosis, a marker variable, and comparison with a common-method latent factor in structural models. Supervisor instructions should ask for ratings of concrete behavior over the previous four weeks and should supply one or two behavioral anchors to reduce halo. Where possible, peer ratings should be added as a sensitivity analysis.

4.5 Ethics and Data Governance

Because the study involves evaluative relationships, the questionnaire must not become a management tool. The firm receives only an aggregate report. The research team holds the raw matching key. Names are removed from analysis files. Participants may withdraw before T3; completed portions are kept or deleted under a minimum-necessary rule. If contribution records are later connected to a digital system, data from this survey must not be written directly into entitlement accounts. That boundary must be stated in the consent form, so that the study itself does not alter participants’ rights expectations.

5. Analytical Strategy

5.1 Preliminary Tests

Report reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity for each scale. Composite reliability and average variance extracted should meet conventional thresholds, and inter-construct correlations should lie below the square root of AVE. Conduct confirmatory factor analyses for the three fairness dimensions, the four trust orientations, and the three contribution dimensions, and compare them with collapsed-factor models. Before aggregation, team-level variables should report median rwg, ICC(1), and ICC(2). If ICC(1) is not significant, the fairness-climate hypothesis should be treated as exploratory.

If missingness is consistent with missing at random, full-information maximum likelihood may be used. Cases whose pairwise missingness exceeds the preregistered threshold should be dropped under the registered rule. Attrition bias checks should compare completers of all three waves with dropouts on T1 variables.

5.2 Estimation of the Focal Model

The individual-level mediation model should be estimated with structural equation modeling. Bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals, with at least 5,000 draws, should be used for indirect effects. Because employees are nested in teams, standard errors should come from multilevel SEM or from cluster-robust standard errors at the team level. Report the total effect, the direct effect, the indirect effect, the ratio of the indirect effect to the total effect, and completely standardized coefficients.

Dimensional hypotheses should be tested in a multiple-mediator model that simultaneously includes organization-focused cognition-based trust, organization-focused affect-based trust, supervisor-focused cognition-based trust, and supervisor-focused affect-based trust, so that path differentiation can be compared with Hypotheses 2 and 4. The competitive-mediator model places POS, affective commitment, and job satisfaction alongside trust to test Hypothesis 6.

5.3 Multilevel and Moderating Tests

Hypothesis 5 uses a multilevel model: individual fairness perception, trust, and contribution at Level 1, fairness climate at Level 2. Estimate a random-intercept model first, then the intercept effect of climate, then the cross-level moderation of climate on the fairness-to-trust slope. Group-mean center individual predictors to separate within- and between-group effects. If the number of teams is near the lower bound, treat the moderation test as directional evidence and lower certainty in the discussion.

5.4 Robustness and Falsification Checks

At least five robustness checks should be run. First, replace the three fairness dimensions with an overall fairness factor to see whether the main conclusion depends on the cut. Second, replace supervisor ratings with peer ratings. Third, control a T1 baseline of voluntary contribution if a short other-rating can be obtained at T1. Fourth, exclude employees with fewer than six months of tenure. Fifth, compare firms in a multiple-group analysis to see whether a single firm drives the conclusion.

Falsification criteria should be written in advance. If the total effect of fairness on T3 contribution is not significant and the confidence interval for the trust-mediated indirect effect includes zero, the core proposition is not supported. If only satisfaction mediates and trust does not, the mechanism is closer to an affective path than to a path of relational entrustment. If only self-rated contribution holds and other-rated contribution does not, common method variance rather than the substantive mechanism should be suspected. Such failures have theoretical value and should not be rewritten, at the analysis stage, as “partial support.”

Table 3. Hypotheses, Estimation Strategy, and Preregistered Decision Rules

Note: All decision rules must be written into the preregistration file before data lock.

6. Intended Theoretical Contributions

6.1 Returning Fairness to a Co-Creation Order

The organizational justice literature is mature. Adding another mediation model in which fairness promotes citizenship would not, by itself, constitute a theoretical contribution. What this paper tries to change is the place of fairness. In the human-resource tradition, fairness is mainly a managerial instrument for raising attitudes and performance. In the stakeholder tradition, fairness is the normative basis on which a cooperative scheme can generate obligations.[4][5] When employees are understood as participants in co-creation, fairness perception no longer answers only “am I satisfied?” It answers “do I still have reason to place future input in this undertaking?” That shift connects justice research to capital governance: a basis of claims cannot live only in principles; it must enter the allocations, procedures, and interactions that participants can perceive.[6]

6.2 A Harder Boundary for Voluntary Contribution than for Citizenship

The contribution of OCB research is not in doubt. In use, however, the construct tends to expand until almost any “good behavior” can be placed inside it. This paper tightens voluntary contribution with three criteria: time structure, capital meaning, and risk structure. The behavior must be ongoing; it must help form absorbable long-term capability; and it usually places the contributor in a position that can be appropriated. The study then explains not why employees are polite, but why they continue to hand the organization effort that is hard to recover. For stakeholder capital theory, that micro-foundation is necessary. Without continued voluntary contribution, co-creation is only a stack of spot trades and cannot become capital.

6.3 Writing Trust as a Testable Translation Mechanism, Not as Moral Atmosphere

Prior research has already shown, repeatedly, that trust matters. This paper stresses the temporal place of trust: it translates just treatment that has already occurred into expectations of repayment and protection that have not yet occurred. Distinguishing cognition from affect, and organization from supervisor, is not an exercise in adding variables. It is a way of saying that different fairness cues enter different objects of entrustment and then lead to different kinds of contribution. If later data support that differentiation, the mechanism is more precise than “fairness promotes good behavior through positive psychology.” If they do not, one should concede that target matching may be weaker than overall social-exchange quality. That conclusion, too, has value in the literature.[2]

6.4 Answering Methodologically to the Word Continue

Continued contribution is a process word. Same-wave correlations cannot carry its weight. Separating fairness, trust, and behavior in time, and having supervisors rate behavior, is the difference between this paper and many justice–OCB studies. The design does not automatically produce causation. It does align the research design with the temporal structure of the phenomenon being explained. That is why this series assigns the present paper the task of explaining why individuals continue to contribute: the individual process should be stated first. Later papers can then move to customers, suppliers, or inter-organizational settings.

7. Managerial Implications

If later data support the model, managers who want more sustained employee input would obtain implications more operable than a general call to strengthen culture.

First, treat contribution recognition as the core of fairness work, not as communication work. The unfairness employees perceive is often not that bonuses are absolutely low, but that “who did what” has not been taken seriously. Building inspectable contribution events, evidence, and appeal paths is itself an investment in trust.[6]

Second, distinguish job performance already settled by wages from long-term input that the contract has not exhausted. Using pay-for-performance to stimulate the former is reasonable. Using the same spot-pricing logic to purchase the latter may damage social exchange. Developmental contribution needs predictable recognition, stable rules, and protection from retrospective punishment after honest failure—not a score attached to every attempt.

Third, everyday supervisory interaction is the main site of interactional fairness and affect-based trust. Explaining decisions, acknowledging risk, and avoiding public belittlement have governance meaning beyond etiquette. If fairness lives only in headquarters documents while front-line allocation and treatment remain arbitrary, the individual mechanism is unlikely to hold.

Fourth, team fairness climate may amplify or weaken individual judgments. Pilots should therefore not be confined to incentive schemes for a few star employees. They should also inspect whether allocation and recognition inside the team are visible, contestable, and correctable. Otherwise a “special justice” for some will be read by others as a new injustice.

Fifth, any organization that intends to write contribution into digital accounts or long-term claims must first possess a minimum foundation of perceived fairness. Technology can harden execution; it can also harden bias. If recognition procedures are not trusted, digitization will only move voluntary contribution more quickly toward defense or exit.

8. Limitations, Boundary Conditions, and Further Research

This paper is a theoretical construction and a research design, not a completed empirical report. Until data are collected, any statement about effect size is only an extrapolation from existing meta-analyses. It is not evidence that the present model already holds.

Even if later data support the main hypotheses, external validity will remain limited. Voluntary contribution in knowledge-intensive teams differs, in risk structure and observability, from voluntary contribution on standardized production lines. In settings of high power distance or high job insecurity, supervisor ratings may systematically understate developmental contribution that takes the form of voice. Cross-cultural use will require recalibration of the scales.

Causal identification remains limited. A three-wave design cannot rule out stable third traits that jointly influence fairness perception, trust, and contribution—for example agreeableness, prosocial motivation, or generalized trust propensity. Later work can control those traits or, where conditions allow, use quasi-experiments: difference-in-differences around a reform of contribution-recognition rules, or staggered introduction of an appeal procedure across teams.

Conceptually, voluntary contribution can still be confused with impression management or compulsory citizenship. If an organization writes “voluntary” into the appraisal form, the construct becomes institutionally contaminated. The conduct of the study itself must avoid producing that contamination.

Further research can follow three lines. The first is to bring customers and suppliers under the same mechanism and test whether fairness perception and voluntary contribution are comparable across stakeholder groups—the task of later papers in the series. The second is to introduce unfairness shocks and repair processes, and to observe how contribution falls after trust is damaged and which explanations and remedies restore it.[6] The third is to connect digital governance: when contribution records, rule engines, and entitlement accounts appear, whether the procedural dimension of fairness perception becomes more important, and whether affect-based trust is partly displaced by verifiable records. All three lines should keep the same discipline: write the mechanism and the falsification standard first, then collect data, rather than covering untested old propositions with new words.

9. Conclusion

Individuals continue to contribute not because the organization has turned every input into an immediate bonus, but because participants still believe that the joint undertaking treats them fairly and that such treatment will remain roughly expectable in the next period. Stakeholder fairness perception supplies the judgment. Trust translates the judgment into a relationship that can be entrusted. Voluntary contribution is the effort delivered in advance inside that relationship. Connecting the three in temporal order, and returning them to the concrete scene of employees and teams, is only the first step in understanding how co-creation forms capital. It cannot replace later work on entitlement design, governance arrangements, and technical foundations. If even this step remains unclear, those later institutions will lack a micro-level warrant.

The conclusion is therefore kept as a conditional proposition. Where contribution is observable, rules have minimum stability, and participants have not fully exited the cooperative scheme, higher stakeholder fairness perception will raise voluntary contribution behavior through higher trust. Whether the proposition holds must be tested with multi-wave, multi-source data after preregistration. Until then, the responsibility of theoretical work is to write the conceptual boundaries, the mechanistic paths, and the standards of failure in the open, not to announce that the mechanism is already in force.

If co-creation is to become capital for shared growth, those who continue to create must be able to explain why they are still willing to hand over the next unit of effort. Fairness gives the reason. Trust gives the expectation. Contribution gives the fact. The task of research is to turn the links among the three into knowledge that can be checked.

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Appendix. Field Implementation Checklist

Appendix A. Three-Wave Field Procedure

T0 (two weeks before launch): confirm the sampling frame, team roster, and supervisor matching table with the firm; complete ethics review and the consent form; preregister hypotheses and the analysis plan; conduct cognitive interviews on a small sample. T1: employees complete fairness perception, demographics, LMX, POS, and generalized trust propensity; team members complete the same climate items in the same week to allow aggregation. T2 (four to six weeks after T1): employees complete cognition- and affect-based trust toward the organization and the supervisor, satisfaction, and affective commitment. T3 (four to six weeks after T2): supervisors rate each subordinate’s three contribution dimensions and task performance; where possible, a skip-level supervisor rates overall team collaboration. T4 (optional, three months after T3): extract turnover and internal mobility from personnel records for the lagged criterion in Hypothesis 7.

Appendix B. Exclusion and Aggregation Rules for Preregistration

Exclusion: completion time below 30 percent of the pretest median; the same response option selected for more than 80 percent of items; failed attention checks; unmatched supervisors. Aggregation: team fairness climate is the mean of the corresponding items; enter the climate hypothesis into the primary test when median rwg is at least 0.70, ICC(1) is significant, and ICC(2) is at least 0.50; otherwise treat it as exploratory. Mediation: take the 95 percent bias-corrected bootstrap interval as the criterion for the indirect effect; do not rely solely on the “significant, then non-significant” stepwise rule.

Appendix C. Division of Labor within the Series

This paper explains only why individuals continue to contribute in employee and team settings. It does not treat continued customer participation, suppliers’ specific investment, long-term commitments between founders and investors, or the technical realization of on-chain contribution recognition. Those questions should keep their own units, mechanisms, and data. The individual psychological mechanism in this paper should not be stretched into a universal law for all stakeholders. If the present model holds, it supplies a micro-level benchmark for later papers: fairness perception supports voluntary contribution through trust. Departures among other stakeholder groups should be treated as phenomena that need new explanation, not as cases to be absorbed by this model.

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Suggested citation: Andrew David W.Y., & Grok. (2026). The influence mechanism of stakeholder fairness perception on voluntary contribution behavior: The mediating role of trust.