Organizational Justice Concepts and Distinctions

Organizational Justice Concepts and Distinctions

Contemporary business management theorists and industrial psychologists have incorporated three specific aspects of organizational justice considered to influence employee attitudes and behavior in relation to their perceived relationship with their employers and their vocational satisfaction. Generally, organizational justice refers to the degree that employees consider themselves to be treated fairly at work. More particularly, those individual components of organizational justice are distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. In that regard, distributive justices corresponds to the perceived fairness resource and reward allocation and distribution; procedural justice refers to the perceived fairness of the processes and procedures that determine resource and reward allocation; finally, interactional justice refers to the qualitative measure of interpersonal aspects of relationships with coworkers and (especially) supervisors and management.

While all three components of organizational justice are important, analysts consider procedural justice to be most directly connected to and determinative of employee perceptions consistent with satisfaction with their employers and perceptions of fairness. That is largely because distributive justice is directly dependent on procedural justice and because interactional justice, while preferable, is more analogous to the proverbial icing on a cake. Distributive justice determines exactly how resources and awards are allocated but procedural justice operates much further "upstream" because it determines the specific processes, standards, and criteria by which distributions and are allocated and awarded. In effect, distributive justice is merely a function of the way that procedural justice is implemented. Moreover, interactional aspects of organizational justice can (and sometimes do) differ substantially from procedural and distributive elements of organizational justice. In fact, interactional justice can even be used as a mechanism of attempting to compensate employees for unfairness and inequity in the other component elements of organizational justice.