Justice Orientation

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Recent research has suggested the presence of an individual-difference variable, related to justice, that affects both the formation of justice judgments and individuals’ reactions to unfair treatment (Rupp, Byrne, & Wadlington, 2003; Schmitt & Dörfel, 1999). Fairness theory (Folger & Cropanzano, 2001) and its subcomponent, the deontological model (Cropanzano, Goldman, & Folger, 2003; Folger, 1998, 2001), purport that justice is a moral virtue held by all individuals that assists in regulating interpersonal behavior. Although evidence supporting this model has been promising (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1986; Rupp, 2003; Turillo, Folger, Lavelle, Umphress, & Gee, 2002), research has recently argued that individual differences exist in the extent to which this “justice virtue” is held. This construct has been termed justice orientation and has been defined as the extent to which individuals internalize justice as a moral virtue and are attentive to issues of fairness around them. In a recent four-study paper, Rupp, Byrne, and Wadlington (2003) presented construct validity evidence finding that justice orientation moderated the relationship between individual-level justice perceptions (both IJ and PJ) and individual-level outcomes (e.g., commitment, satisfaction, and emotional exhaustion). In the current study we seek to extend these findings by testing whether justice orientation moderates the relationship between multifoci justice climate and individual-level outcomes. Following the deontological model, individuals higher in justice orientation are more likely to notice justice issues surrounding them. As a result, these individuals are more likely to be influenced by justice climate than those lower in justice orientation. Therefore, justice climate effects should be moderated by justice orientation, with justice climate having a stronger effect on attitudes and behaviors of individuals high in justice orientation.

justice orientation served as a moderator of supervisor-focused PJ climate effects only when predicting supervisory commitment and satisfaction. This finding provides some support for the extension of the deontological model of workplace justice (Cropanzano, Goldman, & Folger, 2003; Rupp, 2003; Rupp, Byrne, & Wadlington, 2003). Whereas the model implies that individual differences may impact justice judgments, we sought to test whether individual differences in justice orientation interacted with justice climate in predicting individual-level outcomes. To find any significant results here should be of great interest to researchers in this area. Perhaps at the group level, organizational injustices and justice judgments made about information and interpersonal treatment are quite obvious and cause people to get upset regardless of their moral or ethical makeup. This could certainly explain the public outcry regarding recent corporate scandals. In addition, because all employees work for an organization, organizational injustices may be more salient because they are talked about and are much more a part of the corporate culture. Conversely, the climate surrounding injustices coming from the supervisor, made about workplace policies, may be subtler. Supervisors and subordinates have oneon-one relationships, so there may be fewer external cues available to make the presence of injustice salient. Therefore, those higher in justice orientation may be more sensitive to supervisor-focused PJ climate than to the other justice climate types. Our analyses also indicated an unhypothesized cross-foci interaction effect between organization-focused IFJ climate and justice orientation in the prediction of supervisor-directed citizenship behavior. In our sample, organization-focused IFJ exerted effects on all three supervisor-directed outcomes. IFJ has received far less research attention than the other justice types, but in our sample, it exerted many interesting effects. Future research should seek to determine whether this interaction replicates, as well as to further understand the construct of IFJ, at both the individual and group levels.

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