Content area
Full Text
Keywords Employees, Benefits, Justice
Abstract The self-interest and relational models of organizational justice were tested to explain the relationship between benefit plan type and organizational justice. Benefit plan types considered wereflexibk and traditional plans. In support of the self-interest model employees inflexible benefit plans had significantly higher perceptions of procedural justice than employees in traditional benefit plans. There were no significant differences in perceptions of distributive justice between the plan types.
This study tests two competing theories to explain the nature of the relationship between benefit plan type and organizational justice. The plan types examined are flexible and standard plans. The organizational justice theories considered are the self-interest model (Thibaut and Walker, 1975) and the relational model (Lind and Tyler, 1988).
Organizational justice is related to both procedural and distributive justice (Cropanzano and Greenberg, 1997). Distributive justice relates to the perceived fairness of outcomes or allocations that an individual receives. The outcomes considered in this research are life insurance, long-term disability, health insurance, dental insurance, and pensions. Procedural justice relates to perceptions of fairness regarding the methods, mechanisms, and processes used to determine these outcomes (Folger and Cropanzano, 1998). The procedures considered in this study are those for making benefit claims, design of benefit plans, communication of benefit information, and making amendments to benefit plans.
Organizational justice is important in general terms because perceptions of organizational justice have been found to affect a number of behaviors and attitudes including organizational commitment (Ball et al., 1994; Konovsky et al., 1987; McFarlin and Sweeney, 1992), management satisfaction (Alexander and Ruderman, 1987; Fryxell and Gordon, 1989), pay satisfaction (Folger and Konovsky, 1989; Konovsky et al., 1987; Miceli and Lane, 1991; Sheppard et al., 1992), leadership evaluation (Alexander and Ruderman, 1987; Tyler and Caine, 1981), job performance (Ball et al., 1994), job satisfaction and intent to quit (Alexander and Ruderman, 1987; Ball et al., 1994), reactions to layoffs (Brockner and Greenberg, 1990; Konovsky and Brockner, 1993), reaction to criticism (Baron, 1993), reactions to organizational grievance systems (Gordon and Fryxell, 1993), and employee theft (Greenberg, 1990).
Considerable research links organizational justice to specific aspects of human resource management including: job design (Earley and Lind, 1987; Lowe and Vodanovich, 1995), selection (i.e. Gilliland, 1994; Harris, 2000; Ployhart and Ryan, 1998),...