Research Article | Open Access

Perceived Organizational Justice and Workplace Reactivity Among Telecommunication Employees: Gender as Moderator

    Shafaq Hashmi

    National Institute of Psychology, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Shaista Waqar

    National Institute of Psychology, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan


Received
24 Mar, 2017
Accepted
27 Oct, 2018
Published
31 Dec, 2018

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship of organizational justice and workplace reactivity and to study the moderating effect of gender in the relationship of these variables. The sample comprised of 187 employees (123 men, 64 women) of telecommunication sector, from private and semi government telecommunication companies. Organizational Justice Scale (Neihoff & Moorman, 1993), and Workplace Reactivity Scale (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014) were used to measure the study variables; whereas, Stober’s (2001) Social Desirability Scale was also used to control the element of social desirability among participants. Descriptive statistics revealed satisfactory results. Regression analysis showed that workplace reactivity were negatively predicted by perceived organizational justice by all three subscales except interpersonal violence. Men were found to have higher level of workplace reactivity than women and they also had better perception for interactional justice. Gender was found to have significant moderating effect in predicting workplace reactivity from perceived organizational justice such that workplace reactivity varies along with changing levels of perceived organizational justice for men but for women the level of workplace reactivity remains constant whether the organizational justice is perceived to be high medium or low. The findings are discussed in cultural context.

Organizational justice is a key issue for understanding organizational behavior. Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the issue of organizational justice and its impacts on organizational outcomes. Workplace negative behaviors includes a wide range of negative acts conducted by employees to harm the organization and its members. Research indicates that organizational justice is a dominant predictor of workplace negative behaviors. Specifically, the justice perspective proposes that workplace behaviors are reaction to the unfairness perceived by employees in their organizational life. A rich body of research has investigated the relationship between employees' fairness perceptions and various forms of workplace deviance behaviors. In managerial perspective counterproductive behavior will only be considered as a deviant behavior rather than a reaction to some recent scenario (see e.g., Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014). For such viewpoint of deviance, normative controls or screening out of problematic employees might yield to be a temporary solution. These temporary solutions would cultivate feelings of insecurity, hostility, low self-esteem etc. These feelings may act harmful for the organization and its climate and would ultimately lead to lack of human capital.

Whereas, when the behavior or problematic gesture is considered as reactivity, it can yield to a better precautionary measure which will reduce any disruptive behavior and would be helpful in minimizing ineffectiveness. When the antecedents of deviant behaviors are considered, four major categories have been made, taking in to account all the previous researches. These categories are personal, organizational, work, and contextual factors (Lau, Au, & Ho, 2003). Other researches took job satisfaction, stress, abusive supervision etc. as antecedents (Ahmad & Omar, 2013; Omar, Halim, Zainah, & Farhadi, 2011). Among these, organization related factors are found to be famous constructs and several researches have confirmed the relationship (But & Atif, 2014; Ceylan & Sulu, 2011; Fatima, Atif, Saqib, & Haider, 2012; Zribi & Souaï, 2013). But rarely any of them considered the tendencies employees might be developing while they do not display any behavioral signs of deviance. Individuals find it essential to perceive their workplaces as fair, and whenever they encounter acts of unfairness, they urge to see justice restored.

It is evident that the importance of workplace reactivity as a construct cannot be undermined and it is essential to tackle deviant behaviors by finding the antecedent which leads to such behaviors as well as by considering the initial feelings of individuals which are finally leading them to negatively react to environmental cues. Whenever, individuals feel like they have been denied of the rightful incentive or perceive any wrongdoing towards them at their workplace they are likely to respond to it in one way or another. Workplace reactivity can be defined as the employee's affective or behavioral state in reaction to any perceived wrongdoing (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014). Employees are more inclined to act vengefully because of the perception of wrongdoing to be a threat to their legitimate chance at acquiring a position in the organization or getting some rightful resource from it.

Previous studies (Ceylan & Sulu, 2011; Sookoo, 2014) talked about behavioral expressions and did not consider about the tendencies which might be at play but are not translated into behavior. Ogungbamila and Udegbe (2014) articulated that by workplace reactivity they are taking into account the four categories of reactive tendencies which can be classified as intense and mild. The intense forms include corruption tendencies and interpersonal violence while mild forms can be taken as organizational and interpersonal revenge. Organizational revenge might include delayed work, work alienation, or lack of punctuality while interpersonal revenge can be in the form of dishonesty, treachery etc. Ney ( as cited in Abraham & Pane, 2014) defined corruption as behavior which is considered deviating from the norm of public duties due to some private regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or for gaining status, or by violating rules owing to exercising certain types of private-regarding influence. Organizational revenge refers to purposeful, general action of retaliation within workplace in an attempt to restore equity. Acts of revenge in the workplace are viewed by the revenge seeker as defensive acts in response to the unfair actions of the authorities. Interpersonal revenge is a milder version of reactivity in which we do not directly use force rather we use other means to react towards perceived wrongdoing.

Literature provides evidences that organizational justice relate with deviant and vengeful behavior, directly or indirectly (Ceylan & Sulu, 2011; Hershcovis et al., 2007; Rahim, Magner, Antonioni, & Rahman, 2001; Usmani & Jamal, 2013). Organizational justice is one of the determinants of the quality of interaction between worker and organization. It is referred to as the extent to which the employee has been treated fairly and whether the outcomes obtained and the processes carried out are just at workplace (Ceylan & Sulu, 2011). Justice is often described in terms of its perception of occurrence. Perception of justice thus can be defined as the perception of fairness of the exchanges that occur in the organization, either economic or social, involving the individual's relationships with superiors, subordinates, colleagues and the organization as a social system (Zribi & Souaï, 2013). Meta-analytical review (Cohen- Charash & Spector as cited in McCardle, 2007) validated a three-dimensional (distributive, procedural, and interactional) justice construct with interactional justice as a third component.

Distributive Justice entails the fairness in the allocation of organizational resources including salaries/benefits, bonuses, and promotions. Procedural Justice refers to the process through which distribution of rewards is generated. It is generally taken as to how an allocation decision is made. It can be distinguished as objective or subjective circumstances. Bies and Moag (as cited in Schroeder, 2009) suggested interactional justice which is often viewed as an extension of procedural justice because of its focus on organizational procedures, is the quality of the communication process as organizational policies are carried out.

Although, sufficient researchers suggest that organizational justice plays an important role in employees' work life for a variety of reasons. Hence, theoretical models which explicitly outline why fair or unfair treatment can influence employees' work attitudes, emotions, and behaviors (Cropanzano, Folger, & Goldman as cited in McCardle, 2007) also specifies this relationship. First, the instrumental perspective suggests that justice is influential in fulfilling economic needs of employees. Unfair treatment provokes individual to take action to improve the compensation for their work input. Second, the relational perspective explains that fair treatment leads to affirming of one‘s identity within valued groups. Unfair treatment leads to individuals taking several actions to protect their social standing. Third, the moral virtue perspective states that fair treatment highlights the organizational adherence to moral standards of present time. Violations of these moral principles can trigger anger amongst employees, which may elicit retaliatory behaviors even when such actions are not rational. Holmes (as cited in Konovsky, 2000) propose that social exchange relationships are built on individual's trust that the other parties to the exchange will fairly reciprocate their obligations in the long run. As one important source of trust is procedural fairness, fair treatment by management can create feelings of trust by removing fears of exploitation.

Considering the underdeveloped countries, a research done in Bangladesh by Rahim et al. (2001) aimed at validating relationship of organizational justice and reactive behaviors, they found out that the relationship did not differ much across culture rather it was different in different samples they took. Ogungbamila and Udegbe (2014) also highlighted that the culture is a determinant of social role which each gender is assigned for example, African culture nurture females to be less overtly resentful than males. Hence, the reactivity at work would show gender differences. It was first of its kind to take deviant behaviors in terms of workplace reactive tendencies and hypothesized that gender predicts the reactive tendencies such that men have higher workplace reactivity than women. They also suggested that gender cannot be taken as a predictor of reactivity rather future researches should take in to account its moderating role (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014).

Similarly, another study conducted in Pakistan (Sarwar, Alam, & Anwar, 2010) concludes that primary school teachers show higher organizational deviance as compared to interpersonal deviance. The results however, also showed that there is no difference between workplace deviance, organizational deviance and interpersonal deviance. It also showed that there is a significant difference between male workplace deviance and female workplace deviance when considering primary school teachers. One other study showed gender differences in perception of organizational justice, where different types of justice are perceived differently by both genders. This research also showed the interaction of gender with union status, race and occupational group such that minority women value one kind of justice i.e. interactional justice more than minority men, white women or white men in America (Simpson & Kaminski, 2007).

Literature established gender differences in perception of justice but the reason may be as gender inequality prevails worldwide, hence, these differences might be occurring due to this inequality and gender discrimination against women is leading towards higher perception of injustice among women than in men (Mueller & Mulinge, 2001). Simpson and Kaminski (2007) found that the interaction of gender and race had significant effects on the value given to interactional justice such that minority women valued interactional justice more highly than did either white women, minority men, or white men. Moreover, interactional justice was found to be more valued than other two kinds of justice.

Effects of gender on perception of justice and its relation to deviant behavior and intentions yields contradictory findings. A study on organizational determinants of workplace deviant behaviors in Nigeria (Fagbohungbe, Akinbode, & Ayodeji, 2012) suggests that the strength of interpersonal affectivity moderated the relationship between organizational reactions and deviant behaviors. Also, high level negative reactions exacerbated workplace fraudulent behaviors for male group members as compared to female members. Another study conducted for Kenyan population of trained agriculture workers showed that women in general perceive more injustice than men and reasons might be because there was prevailing gender inequality there or because women by nature are more receptive towards external cues to injustice (Mueller & Mulinge, 2001). Another study partially contradicts these results (Lee & Farh, 1999). Ogungbamila and Udegbe (2014) reports, that they cannot find some good support of literature for gender differences in perception of injustice and its relation to workplace reactivity. This study tested gender as a moderator and failed to prove it to be one. They did not take roles of separate kinds of injustice on different reactions rather they only studied the relation of perception of injustice with workplace reactivity on the whole. Study did not take into account the confounding variable of social desirability which might be at play while people reported about workplace reactivity (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014).

The significant role of work environment can never be undermined when considering any problematic behavior of employees. Deviance is seen as an outcome of many factors which include organizational factors too and organizational justice is among those factors. While trying to find antecedent to workplace reactivity, which is an undeniable problem at workplace and is a source of lessening productivity, organizational justice come as the highlighted factor. Considering, the different reactions to perceptions of injustice, the gaps in existing literature has been identified. So gender can be a significant variable to be studied. Gender in terms of differences has been studied separately for organizational justice perception and deviant behaviors, but only few researches (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014) were found which are actually considering gender as a moderator between relation of workplace reactivity and perception of organizational injustice. Further, contradictory findings regarding role of gender lead present study to aim at observing the relationship in indigenous context.

Moreover, telecommunication is a sector found to be evolving constantly. Privatizations, mergers etc., cause structural and functional changes which brings out the need to assess employees' perceptions and feelings towards organization every now and then. Maybe, previously satisfied employees now are found to be dissatisfied because of new changes in authority functions, judgments for pay or relational matters with coworkers and supervisor. This makes telecommunication sector of Pakistan a sample worth exploring.

Further, social desirability can also act as a confounding variable, it is found to be worthwhile to access social desirability of individuals in sample and control this variable (Van de Mortel, 2008). Social desirability has not been taken in to account in previous researches. Hence the unique aspect of this study is that it investigates the relationship of workplace reactivity and organizational justice among telecom employees and to study the moderating effects of gender. Workplace reactivity has been tested on all four sub categories as well.

Hypotheses

For the current study these assumptions were tested:

  1. Perceived organizational justice negatively predicts workplace reactivity among employees.

    1a. Organizational justice negatively predicts corruptive tendencies among employees
    1b. Organizational justice negatively predicts organizational revenge among employees
    1c. Organizational justice negatively predicts interpersonal revenge among employees
    1d. Organizational justice negatively predicts interpersonal violence among employees

  2. Gender plays a moderating role between the relationship of workplace reactivity and perceived organizational justice
  3. Men employees will score high on organizational justice perception as compared to women employees
  4. Men employees will score high on corruptive tendencies as compared to women employees

METHOD

Sample
A total sample of 360 male and female employees from telecommunication sector was approached initially. They were taken from both semi government and private organizations. After screening on the basis of social desirability, sample consisted of 187 individuals including 123 men and 64 women from which 137 belonged to private sector and 50 from semi-government sector. Convenient sampling technique was used to select them from different telecommunication companies.

Instruments
Three instruments were used in order to collect data. A demographic sheet was also used.

Workplace Reactivity Scale. Workplace Reactivity Scale (WRS) is used to measure tendencies of individuals to involve in workplace reactivity and its four components. This scale was developed by Ogungbamila and Udegbe (2014). It is a 26 item scale (1 = Strongly disagree; 5 = Strongly agree). The alpha coefficient of scale is reported to be .95 (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014). It has four subscales including Corrupt Tendencies (9 items), Interpersonal Violence Tendencies (7 items), Organizational Revenge (6 items), and Interpersonal Revenge Tendencies (4 items). Authors have reported satisfactory alpha coefficients for all subscales.

Organizational Justice Scale. This scale has been developed by Neihoff and Moorman (1993). It contains 20 items measured on a five point Likert scale. It comprises of three subscales including Distributive Justice Scale (five items), Procedural Justice Scale (six items), and Interactional Justice Scale (eleven items). The Cronbach's alpha has been reported as .91 (Gurbuz & Mert, 2009). A Pakistani study demonstrated satisfactory reliability for this scale (Tahseen & Akhtar, 2015).

Social Desirability Scale. Stöber (2001) developed this 17 item scale to measure social desirability among individuals. The SDS-17 (Stöber, 1999, 2001) measures tendency of describing oneself with socially desirable attributes owing to impression management. The revised scale contains only 16 items. It has dichotomous response option in terms of True and False. Cronbach alpha of the scale was reported to be .80 in original study. Each “true” response on items 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, and 15 and each “false” response on items 1, 5, 6, 10, 14, and 16 will be awarded 1 point. Then points are summed across items. Thus, raw scores can range from 0-16.

Procedure
Semi government and private telecommunication companies were visited for the purpose of data collection. Written permission was taken from the concerned authority and employees who volunteered to participate were handed over the questionnaires along with the consent form which clearly states the purpose of the study as well as the surety that they can withdraw from the process whenever they want, confidentiality was also assured. Participants were thanked for their participation. All necessary directions were provided and optimal time was given to fill them up. It was very difficult to visit organizations and convince people to participate in the study. Reaching there and keeping under consideration their feasibility while assuring the objectivity of the study was never an easy task.

Overall, 450 questionnaires were distributed, 380 were returned from which only 187 were utilized for analysis because rest of them showed high values of social desirability which was affecting the responses on main variables hence, data was cleaned by exempting the cases with high social desirability the selected data was scored and statistically analyzed.

RESULTS

The data was analyzed to test the hypotheses of study. The descriptive statistics, correlations, t-test and regression analysis were computed.

Table 1:

Descriptive Statistics for the Study Variables (N= 187)


Note. WPR = workplace reactivity; CORRT = corruptive tendencies; ORGR = organizational revenge; INTR = interpersonal revenge; INTV = interpersonal violence; ORGJ = organizational justice; DISTJ = distributive justice; PROCJ = procedural justice; INTJ = interactional justice

All scales used are fairly reliable having reliabilities under the range of .65 to .87 (Table 1). The data can be classified as normal distribution as vales of skewness and kurtosis for all scales and subscales are found within the acceptable range. Mean scores for all scales and subscales lie well in the middle confirming the data to be normally distributed.
Table 2:

Correlation between Workplace Reactivity and Employees
Perception of Organizational Justice (N = 187)


Note. WPR = workplace reactivity; CORRT = corruptive tendencies; ORGR = organizational
revenge; INTR = interpersonal revenge; INTV = interpersonal violence; ORGJ = organizational
justice; DISTJ = distributive justice; PROCJ = procedural justice; INTJ = interactional justice.
*p < .05. **p < .01

Correlation results in Table 2 show that subtypes of each variable strongly correlates with each other as well as the main variable. Organizational justice perception negatively correlates with workplace reactivity and its facets, namely corruptive tendencies, organizational revenge, and interpersonal revenge. The only facet which does not significantly correlate with organizational justice is interpersonal violence. Moreover, the sub types of organizational justice perception including distributive, procedural, and interactional justice also correlate negatively with workplace reactivity and its subscales, the only exception is the relation of distributive justice with interpersonal violence, which do not correlate with each other.

Results in Table 3 show the significant gender differences in workplace reactivity, corruptive tendencies, interpersonal violence and interactional justice such that males have higher mean than females. While the difference is found to be nonsignificant for organizational justice perception score, distributive justice, procedural justice, organizational revenge, and interpersonal revenge.

Table 3:

Gender Differences on Study Variables (N = 187)


Note. CI = confidence interval; LL = lower limit; UL = upper limit; WPR = workplace reactivity;
CORRT = corruptive tendencies; ORGR = organizational revenge; INTR = interpersonal revenge;
INTV = interpersonal violence; ORGJ = organizational justice; DISTJ = distributive justice;
PROCJ = procedural justice; INTJ = interactional justice


Table 4:
Linear Regression Analysis showing the Effect of Organizational
Justice on Workplace Reactivity and its sub-dimensions (N = 187)

Note. WPR = workplace reactivity; CORRT = corruptive tendencies; ORGR = organizational
revenge; INTR = interpersonal revenge; ORGJ = organizational justice

Regression analysis in Table 4 shows that organizational justice is a strong predictor for workplace reactivity giving the ?2 value as -.48. Moreover, organizational justice fairly predicts the sub sets of workplace reactivity including corruptive tendencies, organizational revenge, and interpersonal revenge. The only subset which was not predicted by organizational justice was interpersonal violence as correlation shows nonsignificant level of correlation between the two.

Table 5:
Hierarchical Multiple Regression Analyses Predicting Workplace
Reactivity from Organizational Justice Moderated by Gender (N = 187)

Note. Gen x ORGJ = Gender x organizational justice.
*p < .05

Hierarchical multiple regression in Table 5 shows the moderating effect of gender such that males when perceive less organizational justice are more prone to develop workplace reactive tendencies and take revenge from organization while female, even with the fluctuating levels of perception of organizational justice remains constant with their reactive tendencies.

DISCUSSION

Organizational justice and its workplace outcomes are areas of concerned for researchers in these days. The present study aimed at exploring the relationship of perceived organizational justice with workplace reactivity. Further, to determine the moderating effect of gender between these relationships. Organizational justice was studied as i.e. distributive, procedural and interactional justice in relation to the components of workplace reactivity i.e. corruptive tendencies, organizational revenge, interpersonal revenge and interpersonal violence. Social desirability factor was controlled by screening of data on the basis of cut off scores on social desirability scale (i.e., score > 11).

The descriptive analysis revealed satisfactory levels of alpha coefficients, skewness and kurtosis of data set. Reliabilities of organizational justice scale and workplace reactivity scale were found to be .93 and .95 respectively. For subscales of distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice the reliabilities were noted to be .79, .78 and .93 and for subscales of workplace reactivity i.e. corruption tendencies, organizational revenge, interpersonal revenge and interpersonal violence, the reliabilities were .86, .82, .80 .90 respectively. These reliabilities depict that instruments are reliable to use for further analysis.

Results showed that organizational justice correlates negatively with workplace reactivity and its components too are strongly correlated with each component of workplace reactivity i.e. when the score of organizational justice perception increases, score on workplace reactivity decreases. However, this relation was found to be nonsignificant in case of interpersonal violence predicted by organizational justice and distributive justice. Finding that organizational justice perception can be taken as an antecedent for workplace reactive tendencies confirms their relationship as the literature predicted (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014; Skarlicki & Folger, 1997). The reason for non-significant relation of organizational justice with interpersonal violence might be because people are usually reluctant to admit that they physically involve themselves in some kind of assault at workplace. Also in the case of interpersonal violence the interactive model by Skarlicki and Folger (1997) falls true.

Secondly, as our society is a collectivistic society hence, as the results of several studies signified the moderating role of collectivism between organizational justice perception and deviant and citizenship behaviors, it might be the cause of proving the relation of interpersonal violence and organizational justice non-significant. Collectivists emphasize on social development as an essential goal. Secondly, collectivist societies do not hold strong individual identities and have a stronger group identity (Earley & Gibson as cited in Shahzad et al., 2014). This might act as reason for people not engaging in interpersonal violence. For distributive justice not showing significant relation to interpersonal violence we can take a Pakistani study as an evidence which showed that people give more importance to procedural and interactional justice which results in job dissatisfaction when they perceive procedural and interactional injustice while they still feel satisfied with job even if they perceive distributive injustice (Iqbal, 2013).

Significant gender differences were found in workplace reactivity as a whole and also for two of its subscales namely, corruptive tendencies and interpersonal violence which are the intense kinds of workplace reactivity. These results amplify the findings of researches on deviant behaviors which suggests that males show more deviant behavior than females (Fagbohungbe et al., 2012; Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014) and confirm hypothesis 4 which claimed that corruptive tendencies are higher in men than women. Another research paper gives the same conclusion (Hossain, Musembi, Hughes, & Stern, 2010). It has been suggested that there is gender difference found in aggression and tendencies towards aggression such that they are higher in men as compared to women this might act as a reason for why men show more workplace reactivity in general than women (Eagly & Wood; Maccoby & Jacklin as cited in Schumann & Ross, 2010). The study with workplace reactivity as a construct (Ogungbamila & Udegbe, 2014) showed gender differences significant for all four kinds of workplace reactivity but the present study does not highlight this difference in case of organizational and interpersonal revenge which are the milder kinds of reactive tendencies.

For organizational justice perception the results were found to be non-significant in case of gender differences which contradicts with previous findings of researches (Mueller & Mulinge, 2001; Simpson & Kaminski, 2007) and one study suggests that women trust their supervisors as equally as men hence procedural justice does not show any gender difference (Lee & Farh, 1999) However, a Pakistani study supports the results of present study and suggests that demographics do not significantly correlates with perception of justice (But & Atif, 2014) leading to the rejection of hypothesis 3. Difference was found to be significant for interactional justice. It has been reported that relational type offences were more severely perceived by females than males (Fitness, 2001; Mikula et al., 1990). This has been hypothesized by one study that females are more sensitive towards interactional justice but this was never proved by the study (Simpson & Kaminski, 2007) but they found that minority women actually showed value for interactional justice more than men in America. Although females perceive more interactional injustice still they do not participate more in workplace reactivity. This can be because females are found to be less deviant in collectivistic societies and their emotional expression also differs.

Moderating effect of gender was demonstrated through hierarchical multiple regression which gave significant change when main effect variable (organizational justice) and moderating variable (gender) interacted. Such that in case of women, workplace reactivity levels remain same despite of the change in levels of organizational justice perception but for men, as the justice perception decreases, workplace reactivity increases accordingly. These results confirm our second hypothesis and hence it is accepted. This difference is evident in our results for comparing genders in which no significant difference was found for justice perception among male and female participant groups but for workplace reactivity, significant difference existed such that male participants had more workplace reactive tendencies than female participants. This moderating role of gender was proposed by Ogungbamila and Udegbe (2014) but did not reached any significance in Nigerian population while in our study, results show significant moderating effect of gender. Every culture prescribe different social roles to genders and Pakistan being a collectivistic culture (Robinson & judge as cited by Shahzad et al., 2014) females are assigned a role to be less vengeful and less overtly angered hence, even after injustice has been perceived they are less likely to overtly express their anger as in a study it was reported that Pakistani women have more anger control and suppress their anger (Mushtaq & Najam, 2014). And as anger has been seen as the antecedent for deviant behavior and revenge (Hibino, Yukawa, Kodama, & Yoshida as cited in Schumann & Ross, 2010). This might be the reason because of which the moderating role of gender was observed.

CONCLUSION

The results for this study showed that organizational justice and its sub types (distributive, procedural and interactional justice) negatively predicts all types of workplace reactivity (corruption tendencies, organizational revenge, interpersonal violence and interpersonal revenge). Gender differences for overall organizational justice were found to be non-significant. However, for interactional justice, women were found to perceive less interactional justice than men. Moreover, male employees were more prone towards workplace reactivity and its facets of corruption tendencies and interpersonal violence than female employees. Perception of organizational justice was found to be higher in private sector employees while workplace reactivity was found to be higher among semi-government sector employees. Gender was found to be a moderator between the relation organizational justice and workplace reactivity. Consequently, organizational justice may lead to positive or negative work behaviors. Moreover, there is need to address the interpersonal issues of women employees in telecommunication sector.

LIMITATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

The findings of this research are based on self-reported measures, hence, making it susceptible to personal biases. Although measure social desirability was targeted to be controlled but that is not enough. Most of the data collected was not utilized due to the element of social desirability and a small sample of employees was used. This raises a question on generalizability of results on the population from which the data was collected. Generalizability of results can be increase by selecting employees form different regions and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, Equal number of men and women is to be maintained to correctly check the effect of gender on relationship of variables.

Convenient, purposive sampling was done for collecting data for this research which might have led to the sample which is less representative of the population. Data was collected only from one city, hence, the results cannot be generalized to all Pakistani employees of telecommunication sector.

IMPLICATIONS

Findings of this study can have implications for organizational level as well as employee level. For organizations, it can help in improving human resource practices. The recognition of providing fair environment to employees can increase productivity. Deviance can be minimized by considering deviant behaviors as a reaction to perception of organizational justice and the remedies for increasing fairness in distribution, interactions and procedures can provide long lasting results in order to control ill feelings and negative workplace tendencies. In case of female employees, the demand for interactional justice is high as their perception for it has been found low.

Moreover, interactional justice, when perceived less can lead to more workplace reactivity hence, in any case interactions should be fair if deviance is to be controlled. This can help organizations to work better and tackle problems impeding their growth. Also, jobs can be enriched if employees are provided with the environment preferred by them, making them love what they do.

For employees this research tends to highlight that there is some general tendency among both genders to perceive and react differently to different stimulus. Perception of justice, however, is very different from actual scenario hence, controlling the biases and keeping reactive tendencies low can help individual work better.

For women, interactional justice perception is low this might lead to dissatisfaction for them and it can be controlled by knowing the female's general tendency of perceiving interactions to be unfair and by looking at the workplace scenarios more objectively. For men, workplace reactivity was found to be high which can also be minimized if one can control the general anger disposition and react more appropriately.

For researchers, workplace reactivity is a new construct which needs to be further explored in different context and in different relations. This study can provide the basis for general trends and further research can be done taking this as a preamble.

Future studies should go beyond this, and need to assess the possible reasons and effect of the relationship between organizational justice and other workplace behaviors. This study also suggests more research is needed to examine the relationship between organizational justice and other variables, such as organizational citizenship behavior and commitment etc.

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How to Cite this paper?


APA-7 Style
Hashmi, S., Waqar, S. (2018). Perceived Organizational Justice and Workplace Reactivity Among Telecommunication Employees: Gender as Moderator. Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research, 33(2), 521-540. https://pjpr.scione.com/cms/abstract.php?id=147

ACS Style
Hashmi, S.; Waqar, S. Perceived Organizational Justice and Workplace Reactivity Among Telecommunication Employees: Gender as Moderator. Pak. J. Psychol. Res 2018, 33, 521-540. https://pjpr.scione.com/cms/abstract.php?id=147

AMA Style
Hashmi S, Waqar S. Perceived Organizational Justice and Workplace Reactivity Among Telecommunication Employees: Gender as Moderator. Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research. 2018; 33(2): 521-540. https://pjpr.scione.com/cms/abstract.php?id=147

Chicago/Turabian Style
Hashmi, Shafaq, and Shaista Waqar. 2018. "Perceived Organizational Justice and Workplace Reactivity Among Telecommunication Employees: Gender as Moderator" Pakistan Journal of Psychological Research 33, no. 2: 521-540. https://pjpr.scione.com/cms/abstract.php?id=147