Organizational Justice Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Organizational Justice - Essay Example Organizational Justice is the term used to define people's perception of fairness in an organization. The majority of studies on justice were conducted in the 1960's, but the majority of studies on justice in organizations have been published since 1990 (Charash 278). As it is a relatively newer field, it is surprising the number of studies that have been conducted, Charash mentions 400 studies and 100 theoretical papers. It is therefore obvious that it is an important topic in Business Management. There are three main types of Organizational Justice; distributive, procedural, and interactional (Charash 278, Henle 248). Distributive justice emphasizes the perceived outcome of fairness, and is mainly related to the cognitive, affective, and behavioral reactions to particular outcomes. When an outcome is perceived as unfair, it will affect the employee's emotions and ultimately their behavior in relation to the organization. Distributive justice fails the measure the interpretation of the methods of an organization, it only addresses the outcome. Procedural justice shifted the focus from emphasizing not only the outcome as with distributive justice, but rather the perceived fairness of the process by which the outcome was achieved. (Charash 280). It is simply defined as the fairness of the process by which outcomes are determined. ... They are; (a) the consistency rule; (b) the bias-suppression rule; (c) the accuracy rule; (d) the correctability rule; (e) the representativeness rule; and (f) the ethicality rule. It is worth noting that perception of unfairness in an organization's procedure will result in reactions directed toward the organization as opposed to distributive justice, where the reactions will be directed toward the decision maker. The third type of Organizational justice is interactional justice. Interactional justice pertains to the human side of organizational procedures (Charash 281). It is best explained as the way management is behaving toward the recipient of justice; it relates to the communication process between the source and the recipient of justice. Because interactional justice is determined by the interpersonal behavior of management's representatives, reactions are generally directed toward those individuals as opposed to the organization. It is difficult to determine a measurement of the justice in an organization as the interpretations of justice are subject to an individual's opinion. However, there are some determining factors. Perceptions of justice are influenced by many different variables including (a) outcomes one receives, (b) organizational practices, and (c) characteristics of the perceiver (Charash 282). An organization can be perceived to be unfair if an individual receives an outcome that they perceive to be unfair (ie. Don't receive a promotion they feel they deserve). A set guideline or practice of an organization can be perceived as unfair, such as no health care until a year's employment. The perception of fairness is most drastically colored by the individual who is examining the judgment; if they expect health