Sustaining Interactional Justice Amid Work-Related Negative Emotions: A Moderated Mediation Model in Boundary-Spanning Bank Workers

Background: Boundary-spanning bank employees experience continuous customer interactions that can generate negative emotions and influence how they perceive interpersonal treatment at work. Although emotions are known to shape fairness judgments, little is understood about how negative emotions translate into lower interactional justice through self-related psychological mechanisms. This study examines whether organization-based self-esteem (OBSE), self-efficacy, and external workplace locus of control (EWLOC) jointly condition the association between negative emotions and interactional justice. Method: Survey data were obtained from 338 boundary-spanning bank workers in Istanbul, Türkiye. The proposed moderated mediation framework was examined using PROCESS Macro Model 21, testing OBSE as a mediator between negative emotions and interactional justice. Self-efficacy and EWLOC were included as moderators on the first- and second-stage paths. Bootstrapping with 5000 resamples provided confidence intervals for the conditional indirect effects. Results: Stronger negative emotions were associated with lower OBSE and lower interactional justice perceptions, and the pattern of results was consistent with an indirect association via OBSE. The negative emotion–OBSE association varied by self-efficacy, with the association being stronger among employees reporting lower self-efficacy. EWLOC conditioned the OBSE–justice association, such that this association was weaker at higher levels of external orientation. The conditional indirect association was significant for employees low in self-efficacy and low-to-moderate in EWLOC. Conclusions: The findings are consistent with a moderated mediation model in which negative emotions are indirectly linked to interactional justice through OBSE, with the magnitude of these associations depending on employees’ personal resources and attributional tendencies. The results suggest that strengthening OBSE and related psychological resources may be useful for supporting justice perceptions in emotionally demanding service roles.