Title: An examination of the effects of organizational justice on work behavior after negotiation and salary arbitration
Description: Despite decades of research on organizational justice theories, research explicitly linking organizational justice to work performance is limited. This dissertation examines the effects of distributive (outcome), procedural (process), and interactional (interpersonal) justice on the work performance of Major League Baseball players after salary negotiation and arbitration processes. Specifically, it addresses the following questions: (1) How do low levels of distributive, procedural and interactional justice affect future performance after final offer salary arbitration hearings? (2) how do these effects manifest themselves over time? (3) how do perceptions of organizational justice affect subsequent work performance in the aftermath of brief versus lengthy salary negotiation processes? Time-series, fixed-effects models using career performance data for both pitchers and batters estimated the effects that these workplace processes and their attendant justice concerns have on subsequent performance.

Perceived high levels of organizational justice in negotiations resulted in enhanced work performance, moderate levels in negotiations yielded no effect on future performance, while low levels of combined procedural, distributive, and interactional justice in salary arbitration hearings precipitated a significant decline in performance. Favorable distributive outcomes in arbitration somewhat offset the deleterious effects of procedural and interactional injustice. The endurance of the negative performance effect of low organizational justice during salary arbitration varied between the pitching and batting populations. In the face of substantive economic incentives to perform well, batters underperformed uniformly throughout the season, while pitchers' performance dropped sharply in the first half of the subsequent season and the improved significantly in the second half of that season. This finding seems to point to unobserved differences between the treatment of batters and pitchers by their teams, leading to a mitigation of the negative performance effect for pitchers but not for batters. This also suggests that there may be ways for organizations to ameliorate the negative performance effects attributable to workers' experiences with organizational injustice. The results of this dissertation suggest that cooperative negotiation strategies that engender perceptions of high levels of organizational justice and lead to improved work performance are advantageous to both management and workers.