Organizational justice perceptions have received great attention from
researchers and scholars and have been researched frequently in the field of
industrial-organizational psychology, human resource management
and organizational behavior (Cropanzano and Greenberg, 1997). Research
on organizational justice perceptions, which focuses on the role of fairness in
the workplace, has shown that these perceptions strongly affect the attitude
of workersjob satisfaction, turnover intentions, organizational commitment,
and workplace behavior such as absenteeism and organizational citizenship
behavior (Colquitt et al., 2001). In addition,
research has also demonstrated the linkages between perceived organizational justice and individual work performance
(Earley and Lind, 1987; and Colquitt et al., 2001).
Although the associations between justice perceptions and various work outcomes are well established in Western
literature, very few studies have examined the relationship of justice perceptions with
work attitude and work behavior in the Indian culture. A number of studies showed
that culture does influence justice perceptions of the employees and is an
important determinant of the impact that justice perceptions have on various work
outcomes.
Tyler and his colleagues (Lind and Tyler, 1988; and Tyler et al., 1997) proposed that procedural justice concerns are ubiquitous across diverse societal and
cultural settings. Cross-cultural research on procedural justice has recently begun
(Lind and Earley, 1992; Lind et al., 1997; and Brockner et al., 2000). The first question addressed by cross-cultural procedural justice researchers is whether
non-Westerners (i.e., collectivists) care about procedural justice issues as
well (e.g., LaTour et al., 1976). Similarly, Sugawara and Huo (1994) found that
the Japanese show a strong concern for procedural justice in conflict resolutions.
White et al., (1995) reported that Korean subjects reveal concerns about
procedural justice, although their concerns are lower than those of American subjects.
The present study aims to find the relationship between justice perceptions,
job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and attempts to fill that research
gap. It provides a brief review of the conceptualization of the construct of
organizational justice before reviewing the specific research questions explored here.
When employees react to the way they are treated at work, their motivation
to respond cannot be understood adequately without taking into account
perceived fairness of the outcomes and the procedures used to reach these
outcomes (Greenberg, 1986; and Folger and Konovsky, 1989). The organizational
justice construct has been partitioned into at least three factors—distributive
justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice. Adams (1965) conceptualized
fairness by stating that employees determine whether they have been treated fairly at
the workplace or not by comparing their own payoff ratio of outcomes (such as pay
or status) to inputs (such as effort or time), to the ratio of their co-workers. This
is called distributive justice and it presents employees' perceptions about the
fairness of managerial decisions relative to the distribution of outcomes such as
pay, promotions, etc., (Folger and Konovsky, 1989). In contrast, procedural
justice focuses on the fairness of the manner in which the decision-making process
is conducted (Folger and Konovsky, 1989). In other words, the focus shifts from
what was decided to how the decision was made (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998). As
a third concept, interactional justice reflects the quality of interpersonal
treatment during the implementation of formal procedures of decisions (Bies and Moag, 1986). |
