Organizational justice

Greenberg (1987) introduced the concept of organizational justice with regard to how an employee judges the behaviour of the organization and the employee's resulting attitude and behaviour. (e.g., 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).

Justice or fairness refers to the idea that an action or decision is morally right, which may be defined according to ethics, religion, fairness, equity, or law. People are naturally attentive to the justice of events and situations in their everyday lives, across a variety of contexts (Tabibnia, Satpute, & Lieberman, 2008). Individuals react to actions and decisions made by organizations every day. An individual's perceptions of these decisions as fair or unfair can influence the individual's subsequent attitudes and behaviors. 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.

Organizational justice is conceptualized as a multidimensional construct. The four proposed components are distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. Research also suggests the importance of affect and emotion in the appraisal of the fairness of a situation as well as one's behavioral and attitudinal reactions to the situation (e.g., Barsky, Kaplan, & Beal, 2011). Much literature in the industrial/organizational psychology field has examined organizational justice as well as the associated outcomes. Perceptions of justice influence many key organizational outcomes such as motivation (Latham & Pinder, 2005) and job satisfaction (Al-Zu'bi, 2010).

A concept related to organizational justice is corporate social responsibility (CSR). Organizational justice generally refers to perceptions of fairness in treatment of individuals internal to that organization while corporate social responsibility focuses on the fairness of treatment of entities external to the organization. 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 (Carroll, 1999). Thus, CSR involves organizations going above and beyond what is moral or ethical and behaving in ways that benefit members of society in general. It has been proposed that an employee's perceptions of their organization's level of corporate social responsibility can impact that individual's own attitudes and perceptions of justice even if they are not the victim of unfair acts (Rupp et al., 2006).

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