Does Justice Perception Matter for Psychological Well-being of Executives

INTRODUCTIONThe importance of psychological well-being at work has grown over the last three decades as there has been a shift from physical to psychological sources of pressure at work. Nurturing positive psychological well-being is not at odds with challenging, demanding work. In many ways, pressure at work is psychologically healthy. It provides people with an opportunity to experience a sense of challenge and achievement, both of which are important for high levels of psychological well-being. However, when pressures become too difficult or numerous to cope with, psychological well-being is damaged, rather than enhanced. Previous researches shore up with significant relationships between the levels of psychological well-being in a workforce with productivity and sickness absence (e.g. Harter, Schmidt and Keyes 2003; Wright, 2009).Good work offers opportunities to promote individual health and well-being (Waddell and Burton, 2006). Work can have a positive impact on health and psychological well-being. Fair organizational practices (organizational justice) is one of them which might help in promoting psychological well being in organization.There are several ways to define justice but most generally accepted is that organizational justice is an umbrella term that is used to describe the individuals' perception of the fairness of decisions organizations make, the procedures they use in making decision and the interpersonal treatment employees receive (Greenberg, 1990). This term concerns to people's expectations about the outcomes and treatments they should receive.Available literature elucidate that workplace fairness is a strong predictor of several individual and organizational outcomes (Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001; Colquitt et al., 2001). Literature is richly populated with study describing the positive association between workplace characteristics (e.g. workplace fairness, and considerate treatment with supervisor) and several individual and work related outcomes such as job involvement, commitment, creativity, job satisfaction, health status (Harr and Spell, 2009; Murphy, Flood, Ramamoorthy, and MacCurtain, 2006), and negative association with counterproductive work behaviour (Hendrix, Robbins, Miller, and Summers, 1999), retaliatory behavior (Skarlicki, Folger, and Tesluk,1999), theft, turnover intention (Dailyl and Kirk, 1992) etc.Workplace fairness has a significant impact upon employee's health such as cardiovascular disease, self certified sickness absence, elevated blood pressure etc (Elovainio, Kivimaki, and Vahtera, 2002; Elovainio, Kivimaki, Linna, Brockner, Van den Bos, Greenberg, et al., 2009; Ferrie, Head, Shipley, Vahtera, Marmot, and Kivimaki 2006), These researches are more focused towards physical impact of organizational justice, but very few of them reports the effect of workplace justice on psychological well-being. The Group Value Model of organizational justice assert that fair treatment create a sense of self-worth within employees which related with pride, respect, group- oriented behavior and self-esteem (Tylerand Lind, 1992). The sense of self esteem is directly related with sound mental health. Considering these facts, this study was aimed to examine the relationship between organizational justice and psychological well-being among managerial personnel.METHODSamplePresent study was conducted on 210 middle level male managers from the different private sector organizations in India. Participant's age varies between 24-65 years (mean = 38.54 and SD = 8.20) and organizational tenure is ranged from 1.5 to 38 years (mean= 14.22 and SD= 8.05).MeasuresThe following measures were employed in present investigation.Work Practice InventoryOrganizational justice was measured by using Work Practices Scale. This scale has been developed during research period. The present scale was totally based upon four factor model developed by Colquitt (2001). …