Believing in a personal just world helps maintain well-being at work by coloring organizational justice perceptions

Abstract

Justice is a core fundamental theme for individuals in organizations. This study suggests that believing the world is just where one gets what one deserves, and deserves what one gets, is an important personal resource that helps maintain well-being at work. Further, it suggests that personal belief in a just world, but not general belief in a just world, exerts its influence on well-being through increasing overall justice perceptions of the work environment. Using two waves of data drawn from a large random sample of working adults in Switzerland, results showed that personal belief in a just world at time 1 indeed augmented perceptions of overall organizational justice, and this in turn increased job satisfaction at time 2, that is, 1 year later. As expected, this effect was only evident for personal and not general belief in a just world, highlighting personal belief in a just world as an important yet largely overlooked resource for the work context, and suggesting the need to consider individual’s beliefs about justice as drivers of overall organizational justice perceptions.

Keywords:

• belief in a just world
• organizational justice
• work stress
• job satisfaction

Acknowledgements

This publication benefited from the support of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES – Overcoming vulnerability: life course perspectives, which is financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The authors are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 To further assure that items adequately captured overall organizational justice perceptions, we conducted an additional validation study, including our measure of overall organizational justice (α = .92) and the perceived overall justice scale by Ambrose and Schminke (2009; α = .94). Participants from the United States were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. After excluding 33 participants who did not correspond to the study criteria (e.g., working at least 10 hours per week), the final sample consisted of 231 participants (67.5% men), aged between 25 and 57 (M_age = 34.06), working 39.4 hours per week on average, with an average tenure of 6.37 years, and with 34% holding a supervisor position. Results of an exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation including the perceived overall justice items and the organizational justice items showed a one-factor solution with an eigenvalue of 8.00 explaining 66.70% of the variance. All the items loaded onto this one factor (all loadings > .70). The inter-item correlations ranged between .43 and .90, with an average inter-item correlation of .67. The KMO measure of sampling adequacy was .92 and the Bartlett’s test of sphericity significant, further supporting the adequacy of the one-factor solution. Finally, organizational justice and perceived overall justice correlate at .79 (corrected for attenuation, r = .85). Taken together, results further endorse that the aggregate measure of organizational justice used in the main study adequately captures perceptions of overall organizational justice.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research LIVES].