Management Science Letters 4 (2014) 2124
Contents lists available at GrowingScience
Management Science Letters
homepage: www.GrowingScience.com/msl
A study on the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational
commitment
Jalil Ghafourian*
University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran, Iran
CHRONICLE
Article history:
Received Feb 28, 2013
Received in revised format
19 September 2013
Accepted 23 October 2013
Available online
December 2 2013
Keywords:
Organizational citizenship
Organizational commitment
Organizational justice
Islamic Azad University
ABSTRACT
This paper presents a study on the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship
and organizational commitment in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and
distributes it among some employees of Islamic Azad University and, using structural equation
modeling, we investigate the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship as
well as organizational commitment. The study selects 142 people from 255 regular employees
who work for the university and distributes the questionnaire designed in Likert scale.
Cronbach alphas have been determined for organizational citizenship, organizational justice and
commitment as 0.924, 0.94 and 0.73, which are well above the minimum acceptable level. The
results indicate that procedural justice has the most effect on organizational commitment
followed by interactive justice and distributive justice. In addition, obedience has the most
influential effect followed by loyalty, partnership, innovation and behavior. Finally, the survey
shows that organizational citizenship is influenced mostly by loyalty and partnership. In
summary, the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational
commitment has been confirmed.
2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
During the past few years, many organizations have attempted to establish better working
environment to reach better performance (van Dijke et al., 2012). There are many evidences to
believe that happy workers work better than unhappy employees do and they better contribute to
society as well. There are various studies on learning the effects of organizational justice on
organizational performance. Zeinabadi and Salehi, (2011), for instance, investigated the role of
procedural justice, trust, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment on Organizational
Citizenship Behavior (OCB) in some Iranian schools.
* Corresponding author. Tel: +98- 9123719572
E-mail addresses: j.ghaforian@yahoo.com (J. Ghafourian)
2013 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2013.12.004
22
Many experts generally agree that workforce diversity could generate positive outcomes. However,
some other evidences indicate that workforce diversity could lead to undesirable outcomes as well.
Mamman et al. (2012) performed an analytical framework, which could help us explain why certain
categories of employees, namely perceived low status minorities (PLSMs) could not always generate
desirable outcomes. They applied a number of theories such as social exchange, organizational
justice, status, and reciprocity theories to illustrate why PLSMs would react to perceived injustice to
lower commitment and withdrawal from OCB. Nadiri and Tanova (2010) performed an investigation
on the role of justice in turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behavior
in hospitality industry and reported that distributive justice tended to be a stronger predictor of all of
the study variables compared with procedural justice. They also reported that the fairness of personal
outcomes that employees receive could have more influence on turnover intentions, job satisfaction
and OCB than the perceived fairness of a firm's procedures. In addition, even though improved job
satisfaction seems to be associated with OCB, organizational justice seems to be the key factor that
has a strong impact on both OCB and job satisfaction.
According to Ng and Feldman (2011), organizational tenure moderates the relation in a non-linear
way such that before 10 years of tenure, the strength of the commitmentOCB relation could increase
as organizational tenure increases; after that point, the strength of the commitmentOCB relation
could decrease as organizational tenure increases. Guangling (2011) performed a study on
relationship between employees sense of organizational justice and organizational citizenship
behavior in private enterprises. They reported that sense of organizational justice had a positive
prediction effect on employees organizational identification; organizational identification positively
could improve employees organizational citizenship behavior and the organizational identification
played an intermediary role on relationship between organizational justice and organizational
citizenship behavior. Tang and Tang (2012) investigated the role of high-performance human
resource practices and organizational social climates. They studied the effect of high-performance
human resource (HR) practices on service-oriented OCB through two climates, namely justice
climate and service climate. This field study of 1133 customer contact employees and 119 human
resource managers from 119 hotels in Taiwan indicated that social climates of justice and service
mediate the effect of high-performance HR practices on service-oriented OCB. The study
demonstrated that high-performance HR practices also influenced employees cognition on how they
were treated by hotels and what service behaviors were expected, which in turn could positively
impact collective service-oriented OCB. Wang and Wong (2011) performed an empirical
investigation within the context of hotels in Mainland China to understand OCB from a cultural
perspective.
2. The proposed method
This paper presents a study on the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and
organizational commitment in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it
among some employees of Islamic Azad University and, using structural equation modeling, we
investigate the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship as well as organizational
commitment. The sample size of the survey is as follows,
n
N z2 / 2 p q
2 ( N 1) z2 / 2 p q
(1)
where N is the population size, p 1 q represents the yes/no categories, z / 2 is CDF of normal
distribution and finally is the error term. Since we have p 0.5, z / 2 1.96 and N=255, the number
of sample size is calculated as n=142. The study selects 142 people from 255 regular employees who
work for the university and distributes the questionnaire designed in Likert scale and Cronbach alphas
has been determined for organizational citizenship, organizational justice and commitment as 0.924,
23
J. Ghafourian / Management Science Letters 4 (2014)
0.94 and 0.73 which are well above the minimum acceptable level. Fig. 1 demonstrates the results of
our investigation,
Distributive
First hypothesis
Organizational
justice
Procedural
Third
hypothesis
Organizational citizenship
behavior
Organizational
commitment
Emotional
Interactive
Normality
Continuous
Second hypothesis
Fig. 1. The proposed study
As we can observe from Fig. 1, organizational justice influences on organizational commitment and
organization commitment, in turn, influences on organizational citizenship behavior. The proposed
study of this paper uses structural equation modeling to examine the effect of organizational justice
on other organizational commitment and accordingly on organizational citizenship behavior.
3. The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on the implementation of structural equation
modeling. The proposed study has been applied using LISREL software package. Fig.
2
shows
details of our findings on factors influencing organizational citizenship. As we can observe from Fig.
2, three latent variables are described by 17 explicit variables.
C
J
B
I
The results of standard values
The results of t-student values
D: Distributive, F: Procedural, I: Interactive, J: Justice, C: Commitment, B: Behavior
Fig. 2. The results of structural equation modeling on factors influencing organizational citizenship
24
As we can observe from the results of Fig. 2, RMSEA is equal to 0.062, which is within acceptable
limit, Chi-Square is equal to 172.15 with P-value = 0.00023. These results confirm the results of the
implementation of structural equation modeling. The results indicate that procedural justice has the
most effect on organizational commitment followed by interactive justice and distributive justice. In
addition, obedience has the most influential effect followed by loyalty, partnership, innovation and
behavior. Finally, the survey shows that organizational citizenship is influenced mostly by loyalty and
partnership. In summary, the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and
organizational commitment has been confirmed.
4. Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of organizational
justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment in Iran. We have used structural
equation modeling to study the impact of various factors and the results of our survey have confirmed
that organizational justice would influence on organizational citizenship and organizational
commitment. In terms of organizational justice, obedience has the most influential effect followed by
loyalty, partnership, innovation and behavior. The results of this survey helps managers in different
areas to have better motivation for treat their employees with better courtesy.
References
Guangling, W. (2011). The study on relationship between employees sense of organizational justice
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Mamman, A., Kamoche, K., & Bakuwa, R. (2012). Diversity, organizational commitment and
organizational citizenship behavior: An organizing framework. Human Resource Management
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Nadiri, H., & Tanova, C. (2010). An investigation of the role of justice in turnover intentions, job
satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behavior in hospitality industry. International Journal
of Hospitality Management, 29(1), 33-41.
Ng, T.W.H., & Feldman, D.C. (2011). Affective organizational commitment and citizenship
behavior: Linear and non-linear moderating effects of organizational tenure. Journal of Vocational
Behavior, 79(2), 528-537.
Tang, T.W., & Tang, Y.Y. (2012). Promoting service-oriented organizational citizenship behaviors in
hotels: The role of high-performance human resource practices and organizational social climates.
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perspective: An empirical study within the context of hotels in Mainland China. International
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Zeinabadi, H., & Salehi, K. (2011). Role of procedural justice, trust, job satisfaction, and
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