Overall Organizational Justice Trajectories Among Newcomers: How Do Justice Perceptions Develop and Why Does It Matter?

Abstract

While organizational justice perceptions are often thought to be stable, empirical evidence highlights substantial within-person fluctuations over time. The development of these justice fluctuations may have important implications for newcomers' enactment of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB). Building on fairness heuristics theory to consider the perception of justice as a dynamic phenomenon, we predict that the developmental nature of overall organizational justice (OOJ) perceptions varies between people following three trajectories. A Canadian sample of 103 participants responded to weekly surveys across 17 weeks, resulting in 986 observations. By means of latent class growth modeling, we identified one stable and two dynamic OOJ trajectories. These OOJ trajectories were differentially related to the enactment of OCB. Respondents characterized by the major negative change trajectory (decreasing levels of OOJ) had the lowest levels of OCB enactment, whereas respondents characterized by the stable and minor negative change OOJ trajectory had equally high levels of OCB enactment. Even when accounting for variable-centered between-person elements (primacy, recency and halo effects) when predicting OCB enactment at the end of the study, we found significant effects for the developmental nature of one's OOJ. We discuss the importance of these findings for organizational justice theory as well as their implications for practice.