Justice Perceptions, Organizational Citizenship Behavior, Intention to Quit & Affective Commitment

Introduction Research in organizational behavior has long argued that organizational justice is an important explanatory construct of work attitudes and behavior (Cropanzano, Byrne, Bobocel & Rupp, 2000). This has led to investigations regarding applications of justice interventions to advance organizational effectiveness. The validity of such interventions is corroborated by meta-analytic findings linking justice perceptions to employees' behaviors and performance at work (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001; Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter & Ng, 2001). Indeed, past studies have called for further research into the processes through which justice perceptions influence work attitudes and behaviors (Cropanzano, et al., 2000). According to one of the process theories namely, the fairness heuristic theory (Lind, 2001; Van den Bos, Lind & Wilke, 2001), employees react to a global assessment of organizational justice and this is reflected in processes and attitudes such as organizational commitment, trust, turnover, and job satisfaction (Jones & Martens, 2009; Li & Cropanzano, 2009). Additionally, two other theoretical perspectives that is, the social exchange theory (SET) and the organizational support theory (OST) have suggested an interrelationship between employees' observations regarding organizational justice and the extent to which they are socio-emotionally attached to their organizations (Dailey & Kirk, 1992). When employees view organizational decision-making procedures to be accurate, consistent, unbiased, and correctable, they are more likely to believe that the organizational system follows processes that meet the justice criteria (Colquitt, Scott, Judge & Shaw, 2006; Leventhal, Karuza & Fry, 1980). Furthermore, studies have also found that the procedural justice dimension of organizational justice has a significant relationship with attitudinal and behavioral reactions of employees (Colquitt, 2001). Thus, the objectives of the present study are three-fold. First, by incorporating affective commitment as a mediator, an attempt is made to provide explanations to the processes that govern the linkages between justice perceptions and behavioral and procedural work outcomes such as OCBs and intention to quit. Next, by including affective commitment as a mediator in the proposed model, an essential addition is made to published research that has mostly examined affective commitment as a critical outcome variable. Finally, this study explores the generalizability of western theoretical frameworks in a non-western context by using a sample of practicing managers and executives from India. Distributive & Procedural Justice According to Greenberg and Colquitt (2005), distributive justice refers to an employee's perceptions regarding the fairness or equity of outcome allocation. That is, it deals with the anticipated parity in apportionment of rewards and benefits and it has the potential to have important consequences in the organizational context. Clearly, accumulated evidence suggests that justice perceptions influence a variety of an individual's behavior and attitudes towards his/her organization (Leow & Khong, 2009). Further, it has been observed that distributive justice may be a significant predictor of employees' OCBs because if employees believe outcomes to be unfair, then even if there is procedural fairness, the overall perceptions of equity and justice shall be undermined leading to employees' withdrawal from undertaking prosocial activities (Johnson, Holladay & Quinones, 2009). In this connection, studies related to the linkage between justice perceptions and intention to quit, have consistently demonstrated a negative relationship between the two constructs (Loi, et al., 2006). Based upon the Referent Cognitions Theory (RCT) which argues that outcomes (distributive justice) and procedures (procedural justice) co-exist in predicting a sense of overall justice or injustice. …