The Effect Of Organizational Justice On Organizational Change: LMX As A Mediator

Currently, the frequent business transformation have taken place in corporate, just as enterprises'strategic transition, M&A, layoffs and other organizational change activities, especially the economic crisis has broken out in recent years, the more frequent change happened, the stronger needs of enterprise change management awareness. In terms of management situations of Chinese enterprises, with recent research trends, this study try to search for the relationships between organizational justice and outcome variables, such as LMX, reactions to organizational change, etc.In recent decades, organizational justice has been a hot issue in the research field of organizational behavior. The author categorizes the research trends of organizational justice theory broadly into four major streams:(1) defined the antecedent and outcome variables of organizational justice (boundary conditions), in which many scholars has already done adequately; and (2) mediating and moderating effects on the relationships of organizational justice and organizational variables, which is the main trend of studies in organizational justice in recent years, and more and more scholars have began to introduce other organization theories into the research field of organizational justice; (3) research in a specific context, to test the unique effects produced by organizational justice; (4) the integrating research of organizational justice, some scholars was going to shifted focus on the integration of organizational justice theory, and the recent mainstream of organizational justice theory including Group Engagement Theory, Fairness Heuristic Theory, Uncertainty Management Theory and Fairness Theory. The first research path has been relatively mature, while the fourth stream in China is relatively less, so this study was to follow the second and third research streams, exploring the mechanism of organizational justice in the specific contexts.Specifically, this study measure reactions to organizational change in the context of organizational change, in order to test the effect of organizational justice. Some evidences suggest that organizational justice has indirect effect on outcome variables such as reactions to organizational change and so on. Social Exchange Theory has been introduced to enhance the explanations, so that to test LMX as a mediator. In addition, employee silence as a behavior is concerned several years ago, but is prevalent in all enterprises. Although studies suggest that organization variables (eg, trust, etc.) can predict employee silence behaviors, the relationship of organizational justice and employee silence has never been examined, that is one of the purposes of this study.This study used a questionnaire survey approach with 110 samples from Zhejiang enterprises, getting the following conclusions:(1) organizational justice scale, reactions to organizational change scale and employee silence scale all have a good reliability and validity; (2) organizational justice can predict LMX, reactions to organizational change, organizational identification and employee silence; (3) LMX influences reactions to organizational change, organizational identification and employee silence; (4) LMX as a part mediator on the relationship of organizational justice and reactions to organizational change and organizational identification. Specifically, procedural justice can predict LMX, negative emotions and organizational identification; distributive justice can predict negative emotions, control coping and reactions to organizational change; interactional justice can predict LMX and control coping. LMX can predict control coping, organizational identification and employee silence. LMX partly mediate the effect of interactional justice on control coping, while LMX partly mediate the effect of procedural justice on organizational identification. Finally, the article studies the meaning and limitations discussed.