A study on the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment

Article history: Received Feb 28, 2013 Received in revised format 19 September 2013 Accepted 23 October 2013 Available online December 2 2013 This paper presents a study on the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some employees of Islamic Azad University and, using structural equation modeling, we investigate the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship as well as organizational commitment. The study selects 142 people from 255 regular employees who work for the university and distributes the questionnaire designed in Likert scale. Cronbach alphas have been determined for organizational citizenship, organizational justice and commitment as 0.924, 0.94 and 0.73, which are well above the minimum acceptable level. The results indicate that procedural justice has the most effect on organizational commitment followed by interactive justice and distributive justice. In addition, obedience has the most influential effect followed by loyalty, partnership, innovation and behavior. Finally, the survey shows that organizational citizenship is influenced mostly by loyalty and partnership. In summary, the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment has been confirmed.


Introduction
During the past few years, many organizations have attempted to establish better working environment to reach better performance (van Dijke et al., 2012).There are many evidences to believe that happy workers work better than unhappy employees do and they better contribute to society as well.There are various studies on learning the effects of organizational justice on organizational performance.Zeinabadi and Salehi, (2011), for instance, investigated the role of procedural justice, trust, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment on Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB) in some Iranian schools.
Many experts generally agree that workforce diversity could generate positive outcomes.However, some other evidences indicate that workforce diversity could lead to undesirable outcomes as well.Mamman et al. (2012) performed an analytical framework, which could help us explain why certain categories of employees, namely perceived low status minorities (PLSMs) could not always generate desirable outcomes.They applied a number of theories such as social exchange, organizational justice, status, and reciprocity theories to illustrate why PLSMs would react to perceived injustice to lower commitment and withdrawal from OCB. Nadiri and Tanova (2010) performed an investigation on the role of justice in turnover intentions, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behavior in hospitality industry and reported that distributive justice tended to be a stronger predictor of all of the study variables compared with procedural justice.They also reported that the fairness of personal outcomes that employees receive could have more influence on turnover intentions, job satisfaction and OCB than the perceived fairness of a firm's procedures.In addition, even though improved job satisfaction seems to be associated with OCB, organizational justice seems to be the key factor that has a strong impact on both OCB and job satisfaction.
According to Ng and Feldman (2011), organizational tenure moderates the relation in a non-linear way such that before 10 years of tenure, the strength of the commitment-OCB relation could increase as organizational tenure increases; after that point, the strength of the commitment-OCB relation could decrease as organizational tenure increases.Guangling (2011) performed a study on relationship between employees' sense of organizational justice and organizational citizenship behavior in private enterprises.They reported that sense of organizational justice had a positive prediction effect on employees' organizational identification; organizational identification positively could improve employees' organizational citizenship behavior and the organizational identification played an intermediary role on relationship between organizational justice and organizational citizenship behavior.Tang and Tang (2012) investigated the role of high-performance human resource practices and organizational social climates.They studied the effect of high-performance human resource (HR) practices on service-oriented OCB through two climates, namely justice climate and service climate.This field study of 1133 customer contact employees and 119 human resource managers from 119 hotels in Taiwan indicated that social climates of justice and service mediate the effect of high-performance HR practices on service-oriented OCB.The study demonstrated that high-performance HR practices also influenced employees' cognition on how they were treated by hotels and what service behaviors were expected, which in turn could positively impact collective service-oriented OCB.Wang and Wong (2011) performed an empirical investigation within the context of hotels in Mainland China to understand OCB from a cultural perspective.

The proposed method
This paper presents a study on the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment in Iran.The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some employees of Islamic Azad University and, using structural equation modeling, we investigate the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship as well as organizational commitment.The sample size of the survey is as follows, where N is the population size, and N=255, the number of sample size is calculated as n=142.The study selects 142 people from 255 regular employees who work for the university and distributes the questionnaire designed in Likert scale and Cronbach alphas has been determined for organizational citizenship, organizational justice and commitment as 0.924, 0.94 and 0.73 which are well above the minimum acceptable level.Fig. 1 demonstrates the results of our investigation,

Fig. 1. The proposed study
As we can observe from Fig. 1, organizational justice influences on organizational commitment and organization commitment, in turn, influences on organizational citizenship behavior.The proposed study of this paper uses structural equation modeling to examine the effect of organizational justice on other organizational commitment and accordingly on organizational citizenship behavior.

The results
In this section, we present details of our findings on the implementation of structural equation modeling.The proposed study has been applied using LISREL software package.Fig. 2 shows details of our findings on factors influencing organizational citizenship.As we can observe from Fig. 2, three latent variables are described by 17 explicit variables.

The results of standard values
The results of t-student values As we can observe from the results of Fig. 2, RMSEA is equal to 0.062, which is within acceptable limit, Chi-Square is equal to 172.15 with P-value = 0.00023.These results confirm the results of the implementation of structural equation modeling.The results indicate that procedural justice has the most effect on organizational commitment followed by interactive justice and distributive justice.In addition, obedience has the most influential effect followed by loyalty, partnership, innovation and behavior.Finally, the survey shows that organizational citizenship is influenced mostly by loyalty and partnership.In summary, the effect of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment has been confirmed.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical investigation to study the effects of organizational justice on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment in Iran.We have used structural equation modeling to study the impact of various factors and the results of our survey have confirmed that organizational justice would influence on organizational citizenship and organizational commitment.In terms of organizational justice, obedience has the most influential effect followed by loyalty, partnership, innovation and behavior.The results of this survey helps managers in different areas to have better motivation for treat their employees with better courtesy.
of normal distribution and finally  is the error term.Since we have 96

D:
Fig. 2. The results of structural equation modeling on factors influencing organizational citizenship