Effects of perceptions of organizational justice, identification, and support on outcomes within work teams

Abstract

Social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) and the relational model of organizational justice (Tyler & Lind, 1992) were integrated to form a single mediated moderated model of justice predicting organizational outcomes, using the supervisor and team members as sources of fairness. One hundred and seventy-seven supervisor-subordinate dyads from three separate organizations located across the United States completed surveys measuring perceptions of procedural, interactional, and distributive justices emanating from the supervisor and coworker. In addition, participants provided ratings on perceived support from the supervisor and coworkers; two indicators of identification: workgroup identification towards supervisor and coworkers, and commitment towards supervisor and coworkers; satisfaction with supervisor and coworkers; and ratings of organizational turnover intentions. Supervisors rated permission-granting employees on organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) beneficial to the supervisor and team members, as well as job performance. Results show that individuals perceive fairness emanating from their coworkers in addition to their supervisors, providing supportive evidence for justice as a multi-foci construct. Results of mediated moderated regression analyses showed that interactional justice from coworkers positively predicted satisfaction with coworker, indirectly through perceived coworker support. Coworker support fully mediated the relationship between the interaction of coworker commitment with coworker interactional justice and satisfaction in coworker. The relationship between coworker interactional justice and coworker support was moderated by coworker commitment; for those rating coworker commitment low on the scale, justice was a stronger predictor of satisfaction with coworker than for those rating coworker commitment high on the scale. Similar results were shown for coworker workgroup-identification moderating coworker support mediating the relationship between justice from coworkers and satisfaction with coworkers. Workgroup identification with the supervisor moderated the relationship between supervisory distributive and interactional justice predicting OCB beneficial to the supervisor. Regression analyses also showed coworker and supervisory distributive and procedural justices inversely predicted turnover intentions from the organization. Recommendations for future research are discussed.