[1] For example, if a firm makes redundant half of the workers, an employee may feel a sense of injustice with a resulting change in attitude and a drop in productivity.
People are naturally attentive to the justice of events and situations in their everyday lives, across a variety of contexts.
Fairness is often of central interest to organizations because the implications of perceptions of injustice can impact job attitudes and behaviors at work.
Justice in organizations can include issues related to perceptions of fair pay, equal opportunities for promotion, and personnel selection procedures.
Perceptions of justice influence many key organizational outcomes such as motivation and job satisfaction.
Corporate social responsibility refers to a mechanism by which businesses monitor and regulate their performance in line with moral and societal standards such that it has positive influences on all of its stakeholders.
[7] Thus, CSR involves organizations going above and beyond what is moral or ethical and behaving in ways that benefit members of society in general.
Comparison points against which these inputs and outcomes are judged may be internal (one's self at an earlier time) or external (other individuals).
Researchers have classified three main components of organizational justice: distributive, procedural, and interactional.
Equity focuses more on rewarding employees based on their contribution, and thus can be viewed as capitalist justice: the ratio of one's inputs to one's outcomes.
[12] It includes six main points which are consistency, lack of bias, accuracy, representation of all concerned, correction and ethics.
[18] The accuracy of the two-factor model was challenged by studies that suggested a third factor (interactional justice) may be involved.
[22] One of the key constructs that has been shown to play a role in the formation of organizational justice perceptions is affect.
In addition, affect can act as a mediator between justice perceptions and actions taken to redress the perceived injustice.
A 2007 meta-analysis by Barsky and Kaplan condenses many studies on this topic and explains that state and trait level affect can influence one's perceptions of justice.
[23] It supports the idea that both state and trait level negative affect can act as antecedents to justice perceptions.
Conversely, positive state and trait affectivity was linked to higher ratings of interactional, procedural and distributive justice.
Based on the research regarding the central role of affect in justice perceptions, Lang, Bliese, Lang, and Adler (2011) extended this research and studied the idea that sustained clinical levels of negative affect (depression) could be a precursor to perceptions of injustice in organizations.
[25] In addition, other studies have shown that employee input is related to both procedural and interpersonal justice perceptions.
[26] It is important that the information provided be accurate, timely, and helpful in order for the impact on justice perceptions to be positive.
[16][19] Organizational citizenship behaviors are actions that employees take to support the organization that go above and beyond the scope of their job description.
[32] Thus, the more perceptions of procedural injustice lead employees to perceived normative conflict, the more it is likely that CWBs occur.
Failure to receive a promotion is an example of a situation in which feelings of injustice may result in an employee being absent from work without reason.
[33] Additionally, withdrawal, or leaving the organization, is a more extreme outcome stemming from the same equity theory principles.