Contributive Justice: An Invisible Barrier to Workplace Inclusion

Characterized as an employee's ability to fully and meaningfully contribute to work units or organizations (Mor Barak & Cherin, 1998), inclusion incorporates opportunities to significantly influence positive change in core work processes and to have that influence valued by others. Despite an increasing emphasis on inclusion as a strategy for valuing and integrating diversity into the formal and informal structures of organizations, research highlights variability in employee experiences of inclusion across social groups. Because socio-structural features of organizations influence the nature and extent of employees’ opportunities to contribute to organizations, we speculate that current understandings of inclusion may confound what people do contribute with what they are able to contribute. To better understand differences in people's capacities for contribution as a hidden inequality, we introduce the concept of contributive justice within organizational contexts and advance a model for exploring its meaning, operation, and import. We propose meaningful work and instrumental voice as antecedents and offer a framework for exploring their interactive effects on perceptions of contributive justice. Further, we consider the impact of this type of justice on individual outcomes, particularly employees’ sense of inclusion. We also situate contributive justice within the established nomological network of organizational justice, yet distinguish it as a separate construct with unique explanatory power. We conclude by putting forth research and practice agendas to advance our understanding of role of contributive justice in dismantling structures of inequality and creating more inclusive work environments.