Measures

Greed was measured by the Chinese version (Liu et al., 2019) of the seven-item Dispositional Greed Scale originally developed by Seuntjens et al. (2015). All items (e.g., “It doesn’t matter how much I have. I’m never completely satisfied”) were rated using a five-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree), with higher scores representing higher levels of greed. Liu et al. (2019) demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the Dispositional Greed Scale are satisfactory. In the current study, the Cronbach’s alpha of the scale was 0.86.

The need for social status was measured by the eight-item scale developed by Flynn et al. (2006). All items (e.g., “I want my peers to respect me and hold me in high esteem”) were rated using a six-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 6 = strongly agree), with higher scores representing higher levels of need for social status. In the current study, the scale was translated into Chinese strictly following the back-translation method (Brislin, 1970). The Cronbach’s alpha of the scale was 0.83.

Perceived distributive justice was measured by the Chinese version (Wang, 2009) of the five-item scale originally developed by Niehoff and Moorman (1993). All items (e.g., “I think that my level of pay is fair”) were rated using a five-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree), with higher scores representing higher levels of perceived distributive justice. Wang (2009) demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the scale are satisfactory. In the current study, the Cronbach alpha of the scale was 0.82.

Employee performance was measured by the Chinese version (Wang and Liao, 2009) of a 17-item scale originally developed by Van Dyne and LePine (1998). The scale includes two dimensions, namely, task performance (four-items; e.g., “I can fulfill the responsibilities specified in my job description”) and contextual performance (13-items; e.g., “I have volunteered to do things for my work group”). All items were rated on a five-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree), with higher scores representing higher levels of performance. Wang and Liao (2009) demonstrated that the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of the scale are satisfactory. In the current study, the Cronbach’s alphas of the task performance and contextual performance subscales were 0.67 and 0.81, respectively.

We included gender (1 = male, 2 = female), age (in years), and educational level (1 = primary school, 2 = middle school, 3 = high school, 4 = college, 5 = university, 6 = master or higher) in the survey as these biographic variables may influence level of job performance and are commonly controlled in organizational researches (Motowidlo and Van Scotter, 1994; Ambrose et al., 2002; Kilduff et al., 2016). Besides, we also measured organizational tenure (in years), because it may have an impact on employees’ perceptions of distributive justice as well as job performance (De Clercq et al., 2018).