The Effects of Justice Views on Turnover Intent, Sick-Leave Views, and Sick-Leave Use Among Private Prison Staff

Abstract

Private prison staff are a valuable resource, and they can be affected by various workplace variables. The effects of organizational justice on counterproductive staff behaviors in a sample of correctional staff at a private prison were examined using organizational-justice theory. Specifically, the association of distributive and procedural justice with turnover intent, sick-leave views, and absenteeism were tested while controlling for demographic characteristics (position, gender, age, tenure, and race/ethnicity). OLS regression models show that procedural justice was the strongest predictor and was negatively associated with all three measures of counterproductive behaviors; distributive justice was only predictive of turnover intent.

Keywords:

• Private prison
• organizational justice
• turnover intent
• absenteeism
• sick-leave use view

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the comments and suggestions of the editor and reviewers. These comments and suggestions improved the article.

Notes

1 Because turnover intent was a single item answered using a five-point Likert scale, making it an ordinal level variable, ordered ordinal regression (i.e., ordinal logistic regression) was also estimated. The pseudo Nagelkerke R-square was .49. Gender, procedural justice, and distributive justice all were significant predictors, and the direction of the effects was the same as observed in the OLS regression analysis. Age was not a significant predictor in the ordered ordinal regression equation.