Multiple Dimensions of Organizational Justice and Work-Related Outcomes among Health-Care Professionals

Abstract

The notion of the fairness or justice has become an increasingly important construct in behaviour and management over the last two decades because of its serious personal and organizational consequences. Despite considerable research on job satisfaction and organizational commitment of employees, various types and forms of employees’ justice perceptions have not been adequately examined. Studies of organizational justice in the area of health-care professionals are especially limited in the Indian setting. Because of higher expectations and demands on Indian hospitals, the issues of organizational justice and its associated work-related outcomes are quite relevant to employees working in them. With this background, the purpose of present study is to examine and compare the influence of different dimensions of organizational justice (of distributive, procedural, interpersonal (or relational), and informational justice) on work-related outcomes of job satisfaction and organizational commitment with special reference of healthcare professionals. Participants of the present study consisted of 100 health-care professional working in a government hospitals located in Varanasi (U.P., India). They were classified into three ranks: Doctors (N = 36), Nurses (N = 44), and Technicians and Hospital Administrative Staff (N = 20) and were mainly recruited from four major clinical departments—cardiology, gastroenterology, obstetrics & gynecology, and ENT. The statistical analyses of data included the descriptive statistics, coefficient of correlation and hierarchical regression analysis. The results of regression analysis revealed that among the four dimensions of justice, only procedural justice and relational justice significantly positively predicted job satisfaction of employees. Distributive and informational justice did not predict job satisfaction. Findings further indicated that informational justice was the only dimension that had significantly and positively predicted organizational commitment. Despite the significant zero-order correlations, distributive, procedural, interpersonal or relational justice did not predict organizational commitment. Implications of the study and avenues for future research were discussed.