Which form of organizational justice is the perceived fairness of how rewards are allocated?

Skip to content

Main Navigation

Idea #334

This is one of our free-to-access content pieces. To gain access to all Ideas for Leaders content please Log In Here or if you are not already a Subscriber then Subscribe Here.

KEY CONCEPT

Employees’ perceptions of justice in their organization can impact important outcomes and should not be ignored. In this Idea, positive changes in distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are linked to job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Read on to find how these can be built upon in your workplace.

IDEA SUMMARY

Organizational justice has become a major focus of management research in recent years, due to its connection with numerous employee outcomes; satisfaction, commitment, trust and reduced levels of turnover have all been associated with an employee’s perceived level of justice in their workplace. But how exactly do changes in perceptions of justices—both and positive or negative—affect employee attitudes? In a 2013 paper, Tae-Yeol Kim from CEIBS explores this question, alongside researchers from the University of Macau and City University of Hong Kong. They propose that changes in outcome allocations, company procedures and interpersonal treatment that make employees feel that they are being treated more fairly can go a long way towards improving their job satisfaction, employee engagement and commitment.

Kim et al collected survey data from 151 employees across a wide variety of organizations in Hong Kong, including participants from the finance, service, information technology, manufacturing, and education industries. In particular, they measured fairness perceptions, job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. They found that changes in distributive, procedural, and interactional justice significantly explained variances in job satisfaction. They describe these types of justice perceptions as follows:

• Distributive justice: employees’ perceived fairness of organizational outcomes that they receive. In other words, are they getting back as much as they are putting in?
• Procedural justice: employees’ perceived fairness of the processes by which outcomes are allocated.
• Interactional justice: employees’ perceived fairness of the interpersonal treatment they receive from authority figures (such as dignity, respect, etc.)

Positive changes in these forms of justice were found to be strongly related to job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. In particular, procedural justice was more strongly related to employee attitudes than other types of justice.

Previous research in this area has focused primarily on US workers, and the results have suggested that negative changes in fairness perceptions have a stronger impact on employee attitudes than positive changes. This study, however, showed the opposite; positive changes had a stronger affect on the job attitudes of employees in Hong Kong. This may be due to cultural differences, but is nevertheless relevant for global organizations that may wish to do business in the region.

BUSINESS APPLICATION

According to Kim et al’s research, organizations and executives that want to build affective commitment and enhance their employees’ job satisfaction need to promote and highlight these positive changes in order to leverage their benefits on job attitudes. Undoubtedly, improving employees’ perceptions of fairness is very important, and these findings suggest this can be done by:

• establishing fair procedures in allocating rewards;
• providing detailed and timely explanations for decision procedures and outcomes; and
• tailoring communication to meet employees’ specific needs.

In addition, training supervisors to help them implement fair practices in their interactions with subordinates may also be helpful.

They also found that justice perceptions tended to decrease over time in newcomers to an organization, which might be explained due to the wearing off of a ‘honeymoon effect’. This can be prevented by providing realistic previews of fairness issues in the organization to reduce unrealistic expectations.

• SHARE

•   DOWNLOAD IDEA
•   PIN TO MY IDEAS
•   PRINT IDEA
•   LIKE

Ideas for Leadersis a free-to-access site. If you enjoy our content and find it valuable, please consider subscribing to our Developing Leaders Quarterly publication, this presents academic, business and consultant perspectives on leadership issues in a beautifully produced, small volume delivered to your desk four times a year.

FIND OUT MORE HERE

Authors

Institutions

Source

Idea conceived

December 1, 2013

Subject

Can't find the Idea you are after?

Then 'Challenge Us' to source it.

More Like This

SUBSCRIBE TO IDEAS FOR LEADERS AND ACCESS ALL OUR IDEAS, PODCASTS, WEBINARS AND RECEIVE EXCLUSIVE EVENT INVITATIONS.

For the less than the price of a coffee a week you can read over 650 summaries of research that cost universities over $1 billion to produce.

Use our Ideas to:

• Catalyse conversations with mentors, mentees, peers and colleagues.
• Keep program participants engaged with leadership thinking when they return to their workplace.
• Create a common language amongst your colleagues on leadership and management practice
• Keep up-to-date with the latest thought-leadership from the world’s leading business schools.
• Drill-down on the original research or even contact the researchers directly

Speak to us on how else you can leverage this content to benefit your organization.

Which component of organizational fairness refers to the fairness of a process?

Which organizational justice perceives fairness of the amount and allocation of rewards among as pay and recognition?

Which form of justice represents perceptions of fairness relating to the process of resource allocation decisions?

Which justice is an overall perception of what is fair in the workplace?