The effect of justice expectations on OCBs and its regulation by professional identification

Abstract

In highly uncertain contexts, such as organizations undergoing major change initiatives, employees become especially attentive to procedural fairness. Although research has focused mainly on perceptions of experienced procedural justice, employees also generate expectations about the procedural fairness they will receive in the future, termed anticipatory procedural justice. In this paper, we posit that these expectations can affect employee positive behaviors that are not specifically related to the change itself, namely organizational citizenship behaviors. Further, we hypothesize that employees highly identified with their profession will be less affected by justice expectations, while employees who are less identified will rely on these expectations when deciding to engage in organizational citizenship behaviors. We test our hypotheses using a multi-method approach entailing one experiment with a heterogeneous sample of US workers (n=183), one three-wave panel survey with a sample of US workers from different organizations undergoing wage cuts and layoffs (N=101), and one field survey in a public health government agency facing a large scale organizational change (n=315). In all three studies, anticipatory procedural justice fully mediated the relationship between experienced procedural justice and organizational citizenship behaviors. In Study 3, where the majority of respondents worked in vocational roles (e.g., healthcare specialists and psychology counsellors), professional identification moderated this mediated relationship. Specifically, the organizational citizenship behaviors of employees highly identified with their profession were not affected by anticipatory procedural justice. We conclude by discussing theoretical and practical implications of our findings.