Interactional Justice Dimensions and Organizational Trust: An Investigation into the Moderating Effects of Stress and a Three-Way Interaction

ABSTRACTThe three purposes of this study are: 1) to lend support to the current justice and trust literatures by determining the extent to which interactional justice dimensions - namely interpersonal and informational justice - exert independent effects on employee perceptions of trust. 2) to extend the justice and trust literatures by examining levels of stress as moderators for the effects of justice measures on trust. 3) to provide exploration into the boundary conditions of those moderating effects in the form of a three-way interactions. The results indicated that interpersonal justice was positively and significantly related to organizational trust. However, the direct effect of informational justice on trust was not significant. Support for stress directly moderating these two relationships was not found in a simple moderated relationship. However, support for stress as a moderator was discovered in the form of a three-way interaction. More specifically, that the positive relationship between interpersonal justice and trust was indeed moderated by stress but only under high informational justice conditions.INTRODUCTIONIndividual perceptions of fairness in the workplace have interested organizational scholars for decades. The initial focus was on distributive justice and was concerned primarily with the fairness of resource distributions among employees (Homans, 1961). Examples included aspects of the work place such as compensation, promotion, rewards and dispute resolution (see Adams, 1965; Deutsch, 1975; Leventhal, 1976). In the mid 1970's, scholars began to shift their focus toward a second aspect of fairness specifically, procedural justice. Procedural justice dealt with the decision-making procedures which lead to the distributive outcomes (Thibaut & Walker, 1975). For the next couple decades researchers discovered a great deal about the effects that process has on perceptions of fairness in the organizational context (Greenberg & Folger, 1983; Leventhal, 1980: Lind & Tyler, 1988). Although the research suggested that both distributive and procedural aspects of justice were related to important organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction, satisfaction with leadership, trust, stress and turnover intent, evidence also suggested that procedural justice had unique and stronger effects than distributive justice on most of these outcomes (Tyler & Caine, 1981). Moreover, interaction effects were noted such that high levels of procedural justice seemed to neutralize the effects of distributive justice (Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996) in other words "The effects of what you do depend on how you do it. " (Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996, p. 189)Since then, the attention of organizational justice researchers has shifted again to what would be known as a third dimension of justice, specifically, interactional justice. Bies and Moag (1986) laid the foundation for the justification of a third dimension by stating that interpersonal treatment is a distinct concept from the structuring of procedures. They identified four rules that govern the perceptions of fair interpersonal treatment: 1) Truthfulness, 2) Justification, 3) Respect and, 4) Propriety (Bies & Moag, 1986). Interactional justice has since demonstrated significant effects on key employee outcomes (e.g. Ambrose, Seabright & Schminke, 2002; Ambrose, Schminke, & Mayer, 2013; Aquino, Lewis & Bradfield, 1999). Further refinement to interactional justice was brought by Greenberg (1993 a) in a bifurcation of the interactional justice construct into interpersonal justice which includes respect and propriety and informational justice which addresses the justification and truthfulness rules. Further reasoning for this distinction was presented in Greenberg's lab study (1993b) which discovered that both forms of justice have unique, effects on employee theft. Other scholars have also stated the merits of separating interpersonal and information justice dimensions (see, Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996; Colquitt, 2001; Folger & Cropanzano, 1998; Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997) to include evidence that each dimension has effects independent of the other (e. …