The Impact Of Knowledge Workers' Organizational Justice On Work Performance

The deficiency of the past research on the mechanism of the influence oforganizational justice on work performance led to the disaccord of the relationshipbetween organizational justice and work performance by different researchers. Thisresearch considered the direct and indirect effect of knowledge workers' organizationaljustice on work performance by using structural equation model. The final model was gotby fitting the model to the sample data and many times of modification. The researchresults showed that when affective commitment, normative commitment and LMX wereintroduced as mediators to the model, the three dimensions of organizational justicegenerally don't have direct effect on all the dimensions of work performance, except thatinteractional justice has weak influence on task performance. The direct relationshipbetween organizational justice and performance found by previous research might due tothe failure in introducing proper mediators. The results suggest that it's due to themediating effect of organizational commitment and LMX that organizational justicecauses change in employees' work performance.The results supported the proposal that affective commitment and normativecommitment are the mediators of the relationship between organizational justice andemployee performance. What's more, the mediating effect of normative commitment issignificantly stronger than that of LMX. Affective commitment is the mediator of theimpact of the three types of organizational justice on contextual performance; andnormative commitment is the mediator of the impact of interactional justice on all thethree types of performance, especially on task performance. That is to say, the justice ofthe outcome, and that of the process through which the outcome is attained, or theinterpersonal treatment in the process, all may alter the employee's emotionalidentification with and involvement in the organization, and in turn alter the ex-role workbehaviors. Besides, whether the managers concern, care about, and respect the employees,may greatly affect the employees' perceived accountability and obligation to theorganization, thus alter the task performance and contextual performance performed by theemployees. The results also show that interactional justice is the best predictor of employee performance among the three types of organization justice.The model developed in this article provides important insights to the study ofrelationship between organizational justice and work performance. First, our resultsindicate that knowledge workers' organizational justice has little direct effect on workperformance, but mostly affects performance indirectly through the mediating effect oforganizational commitment and LMX. Second, among the three kinds of organizationaljustice, interactional justice is the best predictor of performance. Lastly, although socialexchange variables have popularly been examined as the mediators betweenorganizational justice and work performance, our findings suggest that organizationalcommitment accounts more in the mediating mechanism. This develops the theory of therelationship between organizational justice and work performance by illuminating themechanisms of the impact of organizational justice on work performance. That is,although social exchange theory accounts a lot for the effect of employees' organizationaljustice perception on work performance, such organizational commitment elements asorganizational identity, involvement, affect, and accountability account more. So ifemployees feel they are fairly treated in the organization, they tend to have better affect tothe organization and regard themselves as indispensable part of the organization, thusdevote more to the organization.