Role of informational justice in job satisfaction: Fairness in Indian software companies

With old established firms (like Sony, Black Berry, Kingfisher Airlines etc) fortunes falling quickly in today's dynamic world, high turnover rates has been attributed as one of the reasons for losing competitive advantage. Employee retention can be improved by providing such an environment to employees that increases their job satisfaction (Ishigaki, 2004). Employees were more satisfied when they felt they were rewarded fairly for the work they have done. In other words, prevalence of justice at workplace results in employees being more satisfied at their job. Justice in workplace situation is very essential to keep up productivity and morale of employees (Rosen, 1991) and to foster organisational citizenship behaviour among employees (Cohen-Charash & Spector, 2001). Absence of justice, whereas, results in higher absenteeism and turnover rates (Hulin, 1991). There are good number of literatures that highlights positive association between organisational justice and job satisfaction (Heidari, & Saeedi, 2012; Fatt, Khin, & Heng, 2010;A1-Zubi, 2010).Justice means absence of any arbitrary distinction between man and man in the social, economical, political or legal spheres. When justice is lacking, people feel discriminated which leads to disharmony and discontentment among various individuals and groups.OrganizationaljusticeOrganizational justice is the psychology of justice applied to organizational setting (Lind & Tyler 1988; Sheppard et al; 1992). It refers to people's perception of fairness of events in organizations (Greenberg, 1987). Researchers have shown that justice in organizational setting enhances commitment, lower turnover intensions and promote organizational citizenship behaviours (Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997). Earlier theories (Adams, 1965; Homans, 1961) conceptualised justice as a uni-dimensional construct labelled as distributive justice. Distributive Justice is defined as perception of fairness of decision outcomes (benefits or punishments) or resource allocation (Saks, 2006), after taking into account norms of equity, equality or need (Kabanoff, 1991). With the progression of researches in the field (e.g., Leventhal, 1980; Lind & Tyler, 1988; Thibaut & Walker, 1975), procedural justice was added as the second dimension making organizational justice a two factor construct. Procedural justice is defined as perceived fairness in the procedures i.e. used to determine outcome (Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997). Further a third factor started getting momentum i.e. interactional justice defined as the quality of interpersonal treatment that an employee receives while a procedure is being executed (Bies & Moag, 1986). Bies and Moag ( 1986) identify four criteria that reveal the quality of treatment (a) appropriate justification of decisions (i.e., effort to explain the results of decisions), (b) honesty (i.e., avoidance of deception), (c) propriety (i.e., absence of prejudicial statements & inappropriate questions), and (d) respect (i.e., sincere & deferential treatment of individuals as well as absence of personal attacks). A just interaction involves adequate sharing of information and avoids rude or cruel remarks. Subsequently researchers (e.g, Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001; Cropanzano & Greenberg, 1997; Greenberg, 1993a) has put forward two types of interactional justice informational justice (this dimension of interactional justice is similar to Bies & Moag's (1986) concepts of justification & honesty) and interpersonal justice (this dimension of interactional justice is similar to Bies and Moag's (1986) concepts of respect & propriety). Most of the researchers however now consider justice as a multi-dimensional construct and suggest measuring each of the dimensions separately (Colquitt, 2001).InformationaljusticeInformational justice involves access to information regarding the reasons on how outcomes were determined. …