ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE: ANTECEDENTS AND IMPACT ON KNOWLEDGE SHARING BEHAVIOUR

Abstract

In today’s competitive business arena, organizations are striving for sustainability and competitive advantage. It is argued that the sustainability and competitive advantage of organizations are mainly dependent on the knowledge, skills and competencies of human resources. Human resources are considered as one of the crucial strategic assets of the organization, and if they are happy and contended the probability of survival and success increases tremendously. In this context, justice or fairness is one of the important factors which can help organizations in gaining the sustainable competitive advantage and organizational effectiveness. Thus, it is worthy to investigate the antecedents of justice perceptions within an organizational setting. Organizational justice has garnered substantial research attention over the past five decades. Most of this attention, however, has focussed on investigating the relationship between organizational justice and outcome variables, such as work attitudes and behaviours. The inquiry on the antecedents of organizational justice has not been fully explored in the extant literature. Moreover, most of the prior research on fairness perceptions has been performed in western countries. The amount of studies available from non- western settings is limited. The current study investigates antecedents (personal and contextual) of organizational justice and its subsequent impact on knowledge sharing (KS) behaviour in an Asian context, using a sample of managers (junior and middle-level managers) from public sector banks of India. This research also examines the mediating effects of organizational justice (distributive, procedural and interactional) and work engagement in predicting KS behaviour. Data were collected using 380 structured questionnaires from a sample of managers, which were administered via a field based survey in public sector banks operating in the northern region part of India. Convenience- based sampling method was used to select respondents. Data were analysed employing the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The mediating effects of organizational justice perceptions and work engagement were examined by using SPSS macro, i.e., PROCESS. The results offer empirical evidence of the significant influence of ethical leadership, emotional intelligence (EI), and psychological contract (PC) fulfillment on all the three dimensions of organizational justice. The result also exhibits that perceptions of organizational justice (distributive, procedural and interactional) positively predict KS behaviour. Further, the results indicate the role of organizational justice perceptions (distributive, procedural and interactional justice) as partial mediators between ethical leadership, emotional intelligence, PC fulfillment and knowledge sharing behaviour. The results further reveal that work engagement act as a partial mediator between all the three dimensions of organizational justice and knowledge sharing behaviour. Additionally, the ii current study reveals some other interesting findings. The results revealed that emotional intelligence plays a vital role in predicting distributive justice than PC fulfillment and ethical leadership. In the case of procedural justice, emotional intelligence and PC fulfillment are the main predictors. Next, emotional intelligence and ethical leadership are the major facilitators of interactional justice. In the case of predicting KS behaviour, distributive and procedural take precedence over interactional justice. Overall, the current study offers a comprehensive framework that assimilates organizational justice with personal and contextual antecedents, and KS behaviour as an individual outcome in the context of Indian public sector banks. Further, implications both theoretical and practical are discussed, and future research directions are recommended.