The programming committee for the 77th Annual SAM International Business Conference is pleased to announce the acceptance of the presentation Operationalizing Organizational Justice: Results of a Principal Component Analysis, authored Peggy Dufour and Anita Jose from Hood College.
Presentation Abstract: Organizational justice is an important concept in the business literature. It is operationalized using distributive, procedural, and interactional variables. In their 25-year meta-analysis of organizational justice literature, Colquitt et al. (2001) note the difficulty experienced by many researchers in segregating items into independent constructs with any degree of uniformity across the field—researchers assigned similar variables to different scales. This overlap was particularly notable between procedural and interactional justice scales, with nearly identical survey questions were used by different authors to measure different variables. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the results of a factor analysis on organizational justice variables. In an international study on business ethics perceptions, more than 1,100 professionals living in 40 countries were asked to respond to 25 statements that incorporated the different dimensions of organizational justice. Principal component analysis (PCA) with Promax rotation was used to analyze the underlying structure of the responses. The rotated pattern matrix had a KMO of .875 and converged in a simple structure in six iterations, yielding the following four components: Rewards (9 items, α = .857); Treatment (5 items α = .892); Discrimination (3 items, α = .764); and Sexual Behavior (2 items, α = .878). These four components explained 61.88% of total variance and Bartlett’s (1954) sphericity test was significant (p < .001). While Treatment, Discrimination and Sexual Behavior contained elements of only one organizational justice variable each, the first component, Rewards, contained items from all three primary organizational justice constructs: distributive, pProcedural, and interactional justice. This finding indicates the complexity of perceived total compensation in today’s workplace, comprising not only financial rewards, but also fair access to promotions, recognition, respect, and other intangible rewards. Perhaps the most striking result of the PCA was how closely the rotated elements aligned with the Motivation (achievement, recognition, the work itself, responsibility, advancement, and possibility of growth) and Hygiene (working conditions and salary, relationship with supervisor, interpersonal relationships, and company policies) variables in Herzberg’s (1959) two-factor theory of employee satisfaction. Implications of these findings for corporate practice and organizational justice literature conclude the study.
Join us online to see this great paper and many more March 31 – April 2, 2022. For registration information visit www.samnational.org/conference.