Effect of participative intervention on organisational justice perceptions: a quasi-experimental study on Finnish public sector employees

Abstract

Changes in the perception of organisational justice have received limited attention in earlier studies. The purpose of this study is to examine whether a 2-year large-scale participative intervention had an effect on justice perceptions among employees. We conducted surveys in three towns (two case towns, one control town) on a total of 1584 municipal employees in 114 work groups that were observed before and after the interventions. Multilevel regression analysis showed that the participative intervention approach was associated with improvement in employees' justice perceptions. Moreover, the employees' evaluation of the implementation of intervention played an important role. Only among those who evaluated that the intervention had been successful, there was an improvement in their perceptions of interactional and procedural justice. The changes in organisational justice were seen at both individual and work group levels.

Keywords:

• Finland
• interactional justice
• multilevel
• participative intervention
• procedural justice

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Academy of Finland (project no. 124271), the Finnish Work Environment Fund (project no. 103432) and the participating towns.