DIRECT AND INTERACTIVE EFFECTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE AND PERCEPTIONS OF POLITICS ON PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL OUTCOMES

Abstract

For millennia in all noteworthy civilizations, the importance and necessity of justice to the maintenance of stability and health of societies have been advocated. Justice in any organizational system is considered to be important at least from two perspectives (a) as a virtuous end in itself and (b) the negative consequences of its absence. Scholars have argued that if organizational decisions and managerial actions are deemed unfair or unjust, the affected employees experience feelings of anger and resentment. Further, the employees affected by injustice not only become angry and unhappy but may also retaliate directly or indirectly. However, organizational justice research has focused mainly on establishing the direct effects of various types of justice on outcomes. There is little research on whether employees’ response to the instances of injustice varies and if so, under what circumstances and to what extent? Hence, an area requiring attention is the incorporation of situational variables into the empirical models to investigate the explanatory power of these variables and to enhance the predictive capacity of justice dimensions in explaining outcomes. Organizational politics has been and is now widely recognized as a fact of organizational life. It has been suggested that it is more important than competence. Scholars have argued that politics should be conceived of as a subjective evaluation rather than an objective reality: individuals respond on the basis of their perceptions of reality, not necessarily reality per se. Thus, how members in organizations perceive organizational politics has been one of the interesting aspects of research in the area. Perceptions of organizational politics have been studied as a direct antecedent to many outcomes; but it has received minimal attention as a potential moderator. viA substantial part of the past research on organizational justice and politics has been carried out primarily in the individualistic western cultures, particularly in the U.S. This study attempts to fill the gap in these two significant areas of organizational life by exploring the interactive effects of perceptions of politics and three types of justice- distributive, procedural and interactional-on five personal and organizational outcomes i.e., job performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior and intent to turnover; it also investigates the direct effects of the justice dimensions and perceptions of politics on these outcomes in a non-Western and still broadly collectivist culture of Pakistan. Data was collected through questionnaires from employees and their supervisors of several national and multinational organizations. The results support most hypotheses suggesting the main effects of three justice types on outcomes. It especially highlights the importance of interactional justice as we find that it is the only justice dimension which showed significant relationship with all the outcomes studied in this research. The findings also reveal that perceptions of politics are significantly related to job performance, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, OCB, and turnover intentions. The results indicate significant interactive effects of perceptions of politics and justice dimensions on job satisfaction only.