Organizational justice climate & organizational citizenship behavior in Indian banks.
| Author | Jain, Ravindra |
Introduction
Employees are considered as the pivotal factor of any service-oriented organization like banking and play a significant role in improving its effectiveness. Indian banking industry is witnessing a paradigm shift not only in its profitability and performance but also in its systems and strategies. To sustain such transformations, there is a need to focus on creating a sense of belongingness and loyalty among the employees and that can be a great source of competitive advantage for Indian banking industry. Committed and loyal employees will produce highest quality of customer services leading to overall customer satisfaction culminating into organizational success. In view of such observations, today's challenge is to satisfy the employees in all respects and help them feel being treated fairly (Bhatt, 2012) and therefore, creating and maintaining 'organizational justice climate' within the organizational set up is a critical phenomenon.
Organizational justice (OJ) refers to the extent to which employee perceives workplace procedures, outcomes and interactions to be fair in nature. The social science definition of organizational justice is based on individual perceptions. An act is considered fair because someone perceives it to be just (Nakra, 2014). The dimensions of OJ are commonly conceptualized as distributive justice i.e., the fairness of decision outcomes, procedural justice i.e., the fairness of procedures leading to a particular outcome, and interactional justice which refers to the quality of interpersonal treatment received by employees particularly as part of formal decision making procedures. Such fairness perceptions can influence employees' attitudes and behavior and consequently organizational performance. More specifically, it involves the ways in which employee perceives whether they have been treated fairly on their jobs and the ways in which those perceptions influence other work related variables (Moorman, 1991).
Most of the prior research in the area of organizational justice has focused on two major issues: firstly, employees' responses to the outcomes they receive, that is distributive justice and, secondly, the means or procedures by which they obtain these outcomes, that is procedural justice (Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997). A few studies provide evidence that people consider the nature of their treatment by others also as a determinant of fairness (e.g., Bies, 1986; Tyler, 1988). Thus, the quality of interpersonal treatment received was also considered as a major determinant of people's assessment of fair treatment (Greenberg, 1990). Interactional justice may be sought by showing concern for individuals regarding the distributive outcomes they received (Greenberg, 1993). Although few researchers have treated interactional justice as a component of procedural justice (e.g., Moorman, 1991; Niehoff & Moorman, 1993; Tyler & Bies, 1990) many others have considered it independently as a third type of justice (e.g., Aquino, 1995; Barling & Phillips, 1993; Bies & Shapiro, 1987; Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). Colquitt (2001) empirically tested the dimensionality of organizational justice and suggested a three dimension structure of OJ as procedural justice, distributive justice and interactional justice. Following Colquit's suggestion, we argue that all the three components are equally significant as an organization that encourages distributive, procedural and interactional justice which are beneficial to both the employees as well as the organization; employees will be satisfied that they have been treated fairly and the organization will be benefitted by positive attitudes and behaviors of those satisfied employees. Earlier research on organizational justice in the Indian context has focused on the unique effects of justice dimensions on key outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behavior, turnover intentions, etc. Further, a fuller understanding of the fairness judgment requires a simultaneous examination of the three dimensions (distributive, procedural and interactional justices) which are found scarce in the literature as most of the studies focused on either one or two dimensions of OJ. In view of these research gaps, we investigated organizational justice with respect to three dimensions viz., distributive, procedural and interactional justice in Indian banks. Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has important implications for organizational performance (Podsakoff et al, 2009) and therefore, we also assessed the impact of OJ on OCB of bank employees.
Review of Literature
The study of Nadiri & Tanova (2010) showed that the perceptions of organizational justice have a strong effect on organizational citizenship behavior. Moorman (1991) studied the relationship between fairness perceptions in the form of procedural justice/distributive justice and OCB and found a causal relationship between procedural justice and OCB but perceptions of distributive justice were not found to influence OCB. Viswesvaran and Ones (2002) revealed that procedural justice was positively related to a greater extent than distributive justice with OCB. Moorman, Niehoff and Organ (1993) found significant relationship between perceptions of procedural justice and OCB dimensions of courtesy, sportsmanship and conscientiousness. Kamdar, McAllister and Turban (2006) examined the relationship between procedural justice and 'interpersonal helping' dimension of OCB in an oil refinery in India and their study findings indicate that procedural justice has positive impact on OCB. Moideenkutty, Blau, Kumar and Nalakath (2006) examined the relationships between OJ and OCB in an Indian company and they revealed that procedural justice (but not distributive justice) and sportsmanship and civic virtue dimensions of OCB were found to have positive correlation. In a recent study of Indian public and private sector companies, Gupta & Singh (2013) found that interpersonal justice significantly predicts courtesy behaviour (a dimension of OCB). Niehoff and Moorman (1993) found significant relationship between interactional justice and sportsmanship dimension of OCB. Dickinson (2009) studied the relationship between OCB and interactional justice among bank employees in the US and found significant but negative correlation between OCB and interactional justice. Schappe (1998) studied the influence of job satisfaction, organizational commitment and fairness perceptions in the form of procedural justice and interactional justice on OCB and found that...
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