Organizational Justice

Organizational Justice

Group 11

Arihant Bakshi [pgp07014]

Rahul Goel [pgp07036]

Sandipan Das [pgp07038]

Shivank Sharma [pgp07042]

Introduction

The most important assets of an organization are the skilled labour, fairness for individuals in not only their everyday life but also in work (Ambrose, 2002)1 and the employee’s commitment towards the organisation. Social exchange theory (Blau, 1964; Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005)2 suggests that our behaviour is guided by our positive relationships in the organization as well as on an individual context. So, the employees who have the capabilities to discern skilled people are of prime importance to the organization. Human Resources (HR) is the most important resource in identifying these skilled people and to garner these skills. An important aspect of managing HR is the perceived organizational justice. Workplace justice is very much important to maintain strong, positive exchange relationships, organizational commitment and leader–member exchange (LMX; Coyle-Shapiro & Conway, 2004; Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005; Shore et al., 2004). As suggested by Blau, these relationships are depicted by personal obligations, gratitude, and trust and individuals act on these feelings to benefit themselves and/or the organization which he is having a relationship. The commitment of an employee towards the organization is indirectly predicted by the three-justice variables i.e. procedural, organizational and distributive justice. The satisfaction of the supervisor is directly predicted by procedural justice, while distributive justice predicts pay satisfaction and also according to research job satisfaction and organizational commitment of the employee is related to organizational justice. It has been found from the exit surveys that the most important reason for employees’ leaving their present job is pay(Hom and Griffeth, 1995), still very less research is done to analyze the effect of organizational justice on job satisfaction, superior satisfaction, and turnover.

Organizational Justice

French (1964) describes organizational justice as individual’s perception of the fairness in the organization. It includes Distributive justice (fairness associated with outcomes) (Greenberg, 1987), procedural justice (fairness of the processes that lead to outcomes) (Thibaut and Walker, 1975), interactional justice (treatment that an individual receives as decisions are made) (Bies and Moag, 1986:44) and interpersonal justice (fairness of person-oriented treatment). Roch and Shanock’s (2006) study developed a scale where interactional justice was purely interpersonal stating that these both are actually same. Informational justice is different from interpersonal justice but its relation with procedural justice is still ambiguous. Organ (1988) suggested that employees may perceive their relationships with their organizations in terms of social interaction. Justice source model was first given by Greenberg (1993) in which it is examined that whether the supervisor or organization influenced outcomes obtained from justice. These studies determined whether the source of justice is agent referenced (originating from individual) or system referenced (originating from an organization). Ambrose and Hess (2001) said that system referenced predicted procedural and informational justice while agent referenced predicted distributive and interpersonal. Justice source and justice content are used to express anger in such models (Rupp &Cropanzano, 2002). Bryne (1999) categorized procedural and interactional as both systems- and supervisor-referenced. Rupp and Cropanzano (2002) founded out that their 4-factor model was fitting their data but they didn’t look into the multifocal nature of types of justices. Jones, Fassina, and Uggerslev (2006) developed agent dominance model focuses only on interactional justice. Williams and Anderson (1991) rooted the idea of system referenced justice and agent referenced justice.

Organizational justice talks about the ways in which employees determine the fairness of the treatment they receive at work and the about the ways other work related variables are influenced by it (Moorman, 1991: 845). The findings of organizational justice research point towards the difference in pro-social behaviours of the employees on behalf of the organization (Muhammad, 2004). Those employees who believe they are fairly treated will have a positive behaviour towards these activities and will be more disposed towards them. Equity theory gave rise to the idea of organizational justice (Adams, 1965). Historically, two-factor model (distributive and procedural justice) had been used for the researches but in recent times the three-factor model (distributive, procedural and interaction justice) has become more prevalent. There is a third, four-factor model (distributive, procedural, interpersonal and informational justice) that is intriguing the interest of scholars. Although on a larger scale this model still remains untapped.

Distributive Justice: Relative to the distribution of outcomes (ex. pay, promotions etc.) the employee perceptions about the fairness of managerial decisions come under this theory (Folger and Konovsky, 1989). Again, the equity theory is responsible for this outcome-oriented viewpoint.

Procedural justice: The perceived fairness in allocation decisions relating to the distribution of outcomes in any organization comes under this category (Konovsky, 2000). It is the process of determining outcomes.

Interactional justice: The quality of interpersonal treatment a subordinate receives from organizational hierarchically senior employees and the execution of organizational procedures (Martinez-tur et al., 2006; Moorman, 1991). The origin of this theory can be routed to the employee reports of unfair treatment that were focused on interpersonal factors and not on the structural factors (Greenberg, 1993).

Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)

The leader–member exchange (LMX) (Graen, Novak, and Sommerkamp, 1982) theory focuses on the relationship between leaders and followers. It suggests that leaders have interactions with the subordinates, and these relationships influence subordinates' responsibility, decisions, and performance.