On the relationship between procedural justice and organizational citizenship behavior: a test of mediation and moderation effects
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/EBHRM-05-2021-0107 |
| Published date | 24 May 2022 |
| Date | 24 May 2022 |
| Pages | 423-438 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
| Author | Phan Dinh Nguyen,Lobel Trong Thuy Tran |
On the relationship between
procedural justice and
organizational citizenship
behavior: a test of mediation and
moderation effects
Phan Dinh Nguyen
HUTECH University, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam, and
Lobel Trong Thuy Tran
Office of the President, 3T Consulting Group, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Abstract
Purpose –This study conceptualizes job engagement and satisfaction as a crucial mediating mechanism in
the relationship between procedural justice and citizenship behavior at individual level (OCB) under the
boundary conditions of perceived supervisor support (PSS) and rewards and recognition (RR).
Design/methodology/approach –The survey data were obtained from two periods of time. To reduce the
potential bias, the authors approached respondents from different business units and measured RRand OCB
from different points of time. The authors assessed the path significance at 95% bias-corrected confidence
interval or more by the PLS algorithm and bootstrapping statistics.
Findings –Using an import-export company data, this study substantiates a positive effect of the proposed
mediational mechanism of job engagement and satisfaction. In addition, the authors substantiate moderating
roles of PSS and RR in the relationships between procedural justice and job satisfaction and, between job
engagement and OCB, respectively.
Originality/value –This study is an important extension in enhancing the procedural justice and OCB
relationship. The results do not only underscore the contributions of job engagement and satisfaction as vital
mediators to the assumed relationship but also lend support to the inclusion of the moderating effects of PSS
and RR.
Keywords Procedural justice, Job engagement and satisfaction, Organizational citizenship behavior,
Perceived supervisor support, Rewards and recognition
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Organizational citize nship behavior (OCB) tod ay is emerging as a vital sour ce of
organizational long-term viability, in which individuals exert their behaviors to promote
organizational functioning and effectiveness (Li et al., 2010;Harris et al., 2020). This allows
individuals to co-work with others and accept organizational regulations (Montani and
Dagenais-Desmarais,2018). While existing studies indicateda focal role of procedure justice in
predicting OCB (Saks, 2006;Ramdeo and Singh, 2019), possible boundary conditions
(e.g. support and reward systems) remain nascent. At individual level, OCB creates a more
positive social and working environment, enhancing performance of a work unit and core
products of an organization (Yadav and Rangnekar, 2015). OCB encompasses collaborative
and participative activities at work that promote organizational cohesion. Thus, OCB is
important for organizationaloperational excellence (Montani and Dagenais-Desmarais,2018).
The attention paid to OCB has increased steadily by both HRM academicians and
practitioners focusing on its antecedence. Meynhardt et al. (2020) indicated that job
Justice and
citizenship
behavior
423
The authors thank the 3T Consulting Group in Vietnam for their helpful support.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2049-3983.htm
Received 24 May 2021
Revised 13 December 2021
Accepted 7 April 2022
Evidence-based HRM: a Global
Forum for Empirical Scholarship
Vol. 10 No. 4, 2022
pp. 423-438
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2049-3983
DOI10.1108/EBHRM-05-2021-0107
engagement could enhance OCB because engaged employees invest themselves more fully
and conductively at work. It follows that engagement initiatives are at the heart of workplace,
which help increase 21% in business profit and 87% in employee retention (Fatemi, 2019).
Consistent with this findings, Zhong et al. (2016) further explored that engaged employees
have higher citizenship behavior as they utilize their advantages and resources with higher
efforts. Job satisfaction is also an important aspect of HRM because it links an employee’s
citizenship behavior and task performance (Thompson et al., 2020). The findings uniformly
indicated a positive and direct relationship between job satisfaction and OCB. As evidenced
by a survey of The Myers-Briggs Company on well-being in the workplace, job satisfaction
plays an important role in driving individual citizenship behavior, such as greater
discretionary effort in helping coworkers (Haynie, 2019). Accordingly, the interest in the “job
engagement, satisfaction, and OCB”chain has increased solidly for its apparent strategic role
in the HRM domain.
However, the extant literature has yet to address how job engagement and job
satisfaction together influence OCB. For example, Meynhardt et al. (2020) explored how
work engagement and OCB affect life satisfaction while Yadav and Rangnekar (2015)
proposed a direct effect of job satisfaction on OCB. The blending role of job engagement and
satisfaction in obtaining a better understanding of OCB is meaningful on both conceptual
and strategic justifications, which requires a further investigation. When employees decide
to help their coworkers or act in their own self-interest, they also consider the practice of
organizational justice (AlMazrouei and Zacca, 2021). Ramdeo and Singh (2019) indicated
that procedural justice comprises of perceived fairness that is vital for employees to shape
their attitude and reactions. That is because procedural justice relates to an intrapersonal
fulfillment, which creates a direct impact on job satisfaction (Ilies et al., 2018). Several
studies have considered job engagement and satisfaction as focal predictors of OCB (Rich
et al., 2010;Ramdeo and Singh, 2019) while lacking a potential moderating effect with a
theory base. Such direct effect which, although literally true and important, is nevertheless
often insufficient and offers little tension, making the empirical findings less useful for
increasing HRM effectiveness (Palmatier, 2016).
Accordingly, we provide an empirical study in which we develop a mediational
mechanism of job engagement and satisfaction on the procedural justice-OCB link under the
boundary conditions of perceived supervisor support (PSS) and RR. In a highly demanding
workplace, PSS and RR are important to understand how employees behave and perceive in
enhancing their relevant outcomes that benefit the firms. We address three questions as
follows: (1) Why are some today organizations focusing more on OCB than others? (2) Does
the linkage between procedural justice and OCB depend on job engagement and satisfaction
at an individual level? (3) What effects do PSS and RR have on employees and their OCB? In
the following sections, we provide the conceptual arguments, methods, and empirical results
to discuss the research contributions.
Theory and hypotheses
Procedural justice and OCB: mediational mechanisms
As widely defined by scholars, procedural justice is the degree to which organizations use
correct and fair procedures in allocating performance outcomes (Farid et al., 2019). Of which,
employees often rely to determine the level of organizational worthiness for investing their
effort at work. Such that, employees look at job resources to compare their contributions with
performance appraisals, which require an unbiasedness from their organizational resource
allocations (Ali and Mehreen, 2020). The social exchange theory considers that justice
perceptions create reciprocal exchange to drive an individual citizenship behavior (Ramdeo
and Singh, 2019). This is consistent with Singh and Singh (2019), who explored a strategic
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