Unfairness and Stress—An Examination of Two Alternative Models: Organizational-Justice and Effort–Reward Imbalance

ABSTRACT

An extensive empirical research has found that unfairness at work can have deleterious effects on employees’ work outcomes. Our study seeks to advance this perspective by using two alternative approaches of unfairness at work–organizational (in)justice (OJ) and effort–reward imbalance (ERI) and its consequences on two separate samples of employees. A total of 583 Pakistani and 241 French employees participated in two samples, which provided cross-sectional data concerning the relationships between unfairness and stress outcomes. Our results revealed that both unfairness approaches (OJ and ERI) were positively related to jo-burnout and turnover intention. Specifically, we found that OJ has shown stronger predictive power to examining stress outcomes in the Pakistani sample. ERI showed a strong link with stress outcomes in the French sample.

KEYWORDS:

• Unfairness
• work stress
• organizational justice
• effort–rewards imbalance
• burnout
• turnover intention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).