Organizational justice and complaints in the US federal workplace

Abstract

Creating fair workplaces has been a critical issue of management. Organizational justice in the workplace is expected to contribute to effective organizational functioning with enhanced employee satisfaction and commitment, whereas discrimination incurs substantial costs to organizations. Considering the importance of this issue, the current research seeks to explore several factors affecting discrimination in US federal workplaces, especially focusing on organizational justice as a managerial factor. Ordinary least squares regression analysis examines whether organizational justice decreases discrimination measured by the percentage of US federal employees who filed a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The result demonstrates that managerial efforts to establish organizational justice pay off in the form of a decreased level of discrimination.

Keywords:

• Organizational justice
• complaints
• discrimination
• US federal workplace

Notes

1. However, one should be cautious in conducting pay-for-performance in the public sector. Unlike employees in the private sector, scholars have indicated that public sector employees are motivated by their commitment to public interest, which is often called ‘public service motivation (PSM)’ (Perry & Wise, 1990). When most employees are driven by PSM, a management initiative such as pay-for-performance may not be as effective as in the private sector.

2. By matching 2006 FHCS data with FY2007 complaints data, this research assumed that there was no dramatic change in organizational justice between 2006 and 2007 across agencies. The benefit of using 2006 FHCS data were that it could assure time precedence in establishing a causal relationship.

3. In 2010, the name of the survey was changed to ‘Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey’ and the survey has been conducted every year since then.

4. For a higher order confirmatory factor analysis, missing values were removed from the data-set. The number of sample retained was 168,998, representing 76% of the sample.

5. The 12 agencies with no complaints were as follows: Holocaust Memorial Museum, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, National Transportation Safety Board, Employment Standards Administration (Department of Labor), Employment and Training Administration (Department of Labor), Bureau of Labor Statistics (Department of Labor), Federal Housing Finance Board, Federal Maritime Commission, Mine Safety & Health Administration (Department of Labor), Occupational Safety & Health Administration (Department of Labor), Millennium Challenge Corporation, and Office of the Inspector General (Department of Treasury). Out of those 12 agencies, 5 are parts of the Department of Labor, 1 bureau is embedded in the Department of Treasury, and 6 agencies are independent agencies.

6. Besides the Headquarters of DHS, agencies with over 6% political appointees include the Federal Housing Finance Board, Federal Labor Relations Authority, Federal Maritime Commission, and Departmental Offices of the Department of Treasury.