Organizational injustice and counterproductive work behaviors : Exploring the role of discrete emotions

The reactions to organizational injustice have been well documented in the literature. Consider the following scenario: Three employees A, B, and C have been treated unfairly by their organization. In reaction to the injustice, each of the employees behaved differently. Employee “A” misbehaved with the supervisor, employee “B” indulged in withdrawal acts of leaving early from office and coming late, and employee “C” stole office stationary. Although the employees were subjected to same kind of unfairness, they reacted differently. This situation raised the question that “Why do individuals respond differently to experiences of injustice? ” In the current research, we addressed this question. Justice researchers tried to address this issue by examining the potential moderators of the injustice-behavior link. Previous studies have examined the moderating effects of risk aversion, trust propensity, exchange Idealogy, equity sensitivity, sensitivity to befallen injustice, trait morality, and Big Five personality traits. The studies have found mixed results for the predictions. Departing from the existing moderators of injustice-behavior link, we proposed and tested a mediating mechanism of discrete emotions between perceived injustices and counterproductive work behaviours. We used fairness theory and cognitive appraisal theories to develop our model. In view of our research question, three aspects were involved which need to be assessed; organizational event having personal significance for the employee, emotions associated with that event, and behavioral manifestation of the experienced emotions. We chose the event of annual salary raise and its significance was assessed by multi-facet fairness perceptions associated with it. We assessed emotions of anger and sadness experienced in response to this event. Five dimensions of counterproductive work behaviours namely abuse against others, sabotage, theft, withdrawal, and production deviance, were assessed as behavioral manifestation of these emotions. We conducted our research in Pakistani Telecom and IT sector organizations. At first place, we conducted a qualitative study to examine the important fairness dimensions, emotions, and counterproductive work behaviours in our research context. Then, we conducted a quantitative study to assess the dimensionality of organizational justice in Pakistani context. Finally, we conducted a survey study to test our hypothesized model. We used an event paradigm (event of annual salary raise) to assess the perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interpersonal justice perceptions. The questionnaires were sent to respondents 15 days after the announcement of their annual salary raise. The participants were asked about their justice perceptions of salary raise event, emotional experience of anger and sadness, and counterproductive work behaviours. We hypothesized that injustice perceptions of salary raise event (distributive, procedural, and interpersonal) may lead to anger and sadness, and anger leads to abuse against others, sabotage, theft, and production deviance behaviours. Sadness, on the other hand, leads to withdrawal behaviours. We also hypothesized that any sort of distributive and/or interpersonal justice violations may lead to the theft behavior. We also predicted that that anger would mediate the relationships of injustice perceptions with abuse against others, sabotage, theft, and production deviance. Sadness was hypothesized to mediate the relationship of injustice perceptions with withdrawal behaviours. Our results showed that distributed injustice predicted both sadness and anger, procedural injustice predicted only sadness and interpersonal injustice was neither a significant predictor of anger nor sadness. We found that violations of interpersonal justice were related to theft but violations of distributive justice were not related to theft. We found that anger partially mediated the relationship of distributive injustice with abuse against others; however anger fully mediated the relationship of procedural and interpersonal injustice with abuse against others. Anger partially mediated the relationship of injustice perceptions (distributive, procedural, and interpersonal) with sabotage. Our findings demonstrated that anger fully mediated the relationship of distributive and procedural injustice with theft. Sadness fully mediated the relationship between injustice perceptions (distributive, procedural, and interpersonal) and withdrawal behaviour. Generally, we found support for mediating mechanisms of emotions between injustice perceptions and counterproductive work behaviours.