John Stacy Adams

John Stacy Adams, who signed his work J. Stacy Adams, was a Belgian-born behavioural psychologist best known for equity theory. A French-language research record on the IDEAS RePEc service says he was born in Brussels, Belgium, in 1925, that he joined General Electric in 1960 as a researcher in a company social programme, and that in this period he developed and tested his theory of equity, which became one of the main theories for understanding justice and human motivation in organisations. He died in 1984 at the age of 59. A Find a Grave biography adds that he held the R.J. Reynolds Industries professorship in the School of Business Administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had taught at Stanford and Columbia, and that his work made it possible to predict behaviour in employee and employer relationships. His 1963 paper on inequity is the usual starting point for the theory that pay and treatment are judged against what others receive.