Organizational Justice and Teachers’ Turnover Intention in Primary and Secondary Schools: The Importance of Sustainable Salary Management

Primary and middle school teachers are a critical part of China’s foundational education; teacher turnover heavily affects the stable development of foundational education. Aiming at the phenomenon of teacher turnover intention in primary and secondary schools, interviews and questionnaires were used to explore the relationship between teachers’ organizational justice, salary satisfaction, and turnover intention in the management of primary and secondary schools. The research subjects were more than 500 primary and secondary school teachers from Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. The data analysis results show that the sense of interactive fairness is the highest, followed by procedural fairness and the lowest sense of distributional fairness, with a certain sense of unfairness among the three dimensions of organizational fairness among primary and secondary school teachers. The average salary satisfaction score is 2.64, which is lower than the midpoint of 3, and there is a certain degree of dissatisfaction. The results of the correlation analysis showed that the pairwise correlations between the variables reached a very significant level. The results of regression analysis showed that organizational justice had the greatest impact on turnover intention, accounting for 20% of the variance. Salary satisfaction plays a partial mediating role between various dimensions of organizational justice and turnover intention, indicating that procedural fairness, interaction fairness, and distributional justice not only have a direct impact on turnover intention, but also indirectly affect turnover intention by affecting salary satisfaction. The results of this study can provide empirical data support for educational administrative departments and school managers in economically developed regions to improve their compensation management level and implement effective and sustainable compensation management policies and programs, as well as provide first-hand information for cross-country comparative studies of teacher compensation management in the field of education administration.