Effects of Organizational Justice on Employee Satisfaction: Integrating the Exchange and the Value-Based Perspectives

Organizational justice is known to help promote organizational sustainability. The literature has explained the impact of organizational justice relying heavily on the social exchange perspective, the idea that employees are motivated to show favorable attitudes in return for the fair rewards that organization has provided. To the contrary, little attention has been given to the proposition that it affects employee’s attitudes by increasing their intrinsic motivation. The latter has a greater implication of sustainable management since intrinsic motivation of its employees is the key to the sustained success of an organization. This approach can be called a value-based perspective. To fill that gap, this study examined the mediating effects of both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation links between organizational justice and employee satisfaction. The analysis revealed that the indirect mediating effects of intrinsic motivation were greater than those of extrinsic motivation for procedural and interactional justice, while the mediating effect of extrinsic motivation was greater when it comes to distributive justice. In addition, the sum of the indirect effects of intrinsic motivation was comparable to that of extrinsic motivation. This result implies that the mediating effects of intrinsic motivation are as important as those of extrinsic motivation, confirming our prediction that organizational justice contributes to organizational sustainability via the path that has not been verified so far.