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According to social identity theory, unfair treatment from superiors may arouse negative identification, which in turn leads to employees' negative behaviors in organizations. In this study the relationships between leadership justice and two negative organizational behaviors - employee silence and organizational retaliatory behavior - were explored in a Chinese context. The study was conducted through a questionnaire-based field investigation, which sampled 361 employees from 17 Chinese state-owned enterprises. The results showed that leadership justice was negatively related to employee silence and organizational retaliatory behavior, and that affective commitment partially mediated these relationships. The implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions made for future studies.
Keywords: leadership justice, employee silence, organizational retaliatory behavior, social identity.
When confronted with circumstances involving injustice, employees may decrease emotional commitment to and evaluation of authority (Colquitt, Cordon, Wesson, Porter, & Ng, 2001); or behave in such a way as to implicitly withhold genuine expression of feelings (Finder & Harlos, 2001) and explicitly act in a retaliatory manner (Skarlicki & Folger, 1997; Spector & Fox, 2002). These reactions are commonly regarded as negative organizational behaviors, that is, "detrimental or destructive behaviors that may hurt colleagues or organizations" (Spector & Fox, p. 270). In the current study the focus was on employee silence and organizational retaliatory behavior, as these represent an implicit and an explicit negative behavior, respectively, and both may be elicited by injustice (Barclay, Skarlicki, & Pugh, 2005; Finder & Harlos, 2001). In addition, in this study the impact of leadership justice on the two negative organizational behaviors was explored from the social identity perspective (see review by Ashforth & Mael, 1989; Tyler & Blader, 2003).
THEORY DEVELOPMENT AND HYPOTHESES
LEADERSHIP JUSTICE
According to fairness heuristic theory (Luid, 2001) outcome fairness is hard to decide because the references of the previous output or of other individuals is usually not available. Substantial effects of interaction with the group (often represented by authority) to perceived justice are implied in this theory. This is consistent with the Chinese guanxi (relationship) culture. In the same vein, it can be inferred that interpersonal justice may play an important role in the four types of justice (Colquitt et al., 2001). In a study with Chinese people, Liu and colleagues (Liu, Long, & Li,...