2024 Volume 9 Issue 2
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Examining the Effect of Organizational Justice on Organizational Citizenship Behavior Through the Mediation of Job Commitment


,
  1. College of Social Sciences, Far East University, Eumseong-gun, Chungcheongbuk-do 27601, Korea.
  2. School of Education & Social Work, The University of Sydney, Sydney 2006, Australia.
Abstract

Today, to develop a successful Information Technology development project, it is important to have good employees. However, it is not enough to just acquire them and maintain their skills; they should help the project in a meaningful way, such as by showing supportive activity, i.e. organizational citizenship behavior. However, Information Technology employees have various motivational factors, and unofficial behavior patterns, and show different organizational citizenship behavior than those who work in other fields. Also, projects provide various facets of operations in an organization and change organizational citizenship behavior. This combination creates a unique context in which it is unlikely that information technology employees (working on team projects) perceptions of justice will follow the same patterns as those created for operational functions. To determine whether justice can cause favorable behavior and attitudes in this new context, a survey was conducted among members of Information Technology development projects. Data from 141 respondents in project teams showed that justice, as measured by employees' perceptions of justice, increased job commitment. Job commitment acts as a mediator between justice and organizational citizenship behaviors. Therefore, project leaders should strive to increase people's perception of fairness in the distribution of behaviors and rewards.


Keywords: Organizational citizenship behavior, Organizational justice, Job commitment, Information technology.

INTRODUCTION

Boundary Spanning IT projects require the presence of clearly recognized behaviors as well as Extra-Role Behaviors, for the project to be completed successfully. Organizational citizenship behaviors or extra-role behaviors have been considered vital for organizational success throughout the history of management, especially when there is interdependence among employees who are needed to perform a specific task like an information system development project. Organizational citizenship behavior consists of useful actions that assist prevent problems, identifying and completing half-finished activities, helping other team members, identifying incomplete functions, and participating in political processes. Rarely, such activities are frankly stated, needed to be performed, or rewarded for doing them, but such activities are for those in which jobs are working, they are essential. Jobs that cover organizational boundaries require resourcefulness and initiative, and there are many ambiguities in them. There is a need to focus on IT employees because studies have shown that IT employees behave differently, are motivated, and have various expectations than other IT employees (Joseph et al., 2007; Allen et al., 2008; McKnight et al., 2009; Kanchana & Jayathilaka, 2023; Peng et al., 2023; Solís et al., 2023).

Much attempt has been made to study the (explicitly defined) in-role behaviors of IT employees, such as job retention and confidently performing tasks distinctive in job stipulations, but employee policies and employee practices that lead to Organizational citizenship behavior have not been well investigated (Yen et al., 2008; Kwahk et al., 2020; Yaakobi & Weisberg, 2020). Considering their importance in the success of information technology projects and the differences between information technology department employees with other employees in the organization, it seems necessary to know how to improve organizational citizenship behavior in employees of the information technology department who work on projects. Information technology works and creates. Studies in other fields provide methods for doing this. The relationship between organizational justice perception (a person's perception of the fair behavior of the organization and its managers) and work requirements has been investigated in the literature on human resource management (Simons & Roberson, 2003; Pecino et al., 2018; Wiseman & Stillwell, 2022; Haines et al., 2024). Although these studies focused on organizations and not projects, they reported that various forms of organizational justice have various effects on organizational citizenship behavior and work commitment.

Various forms of justice include interactional justice, procedural justice, and distributive justice. In addition, it has been observed that job commitment (the view that one's job is vitally important in one's life) affects behaviors and is an important factor in activating the motivation of IT employees (Ahuja et al., 2007; Hou et al., 2022; Mousavi et al., 2023; Shi et al., 2023). Therefore, organizational justice and job commitment of IT department employees act as potential motivational drivers in creating organizational citizenship behavior Information technology, let us do a study. The questions of this study are:

Does job commitment motivate IT employees to exhibit effective citizenship behavior?

Does the organizational justice of an organization help to increase job commitment and improve organizational citizenship behavior?

Which type of organizational justice promotes the behavior of organizational citizenship and does job requirement act as a mediator in such relationships?

MATERIALS AND METHODS

This research is cross-sectional in practical purpose terms. Secondary data collection tools include library methods and primary data based on questionnaires. The method of sampling in this research is random sampling, based on the Cochran relationship, and the required sample size is 157 people, which according to the limitations and to increase the quality of the data, 200 distribution questionnaires and 141 analysis questionnaires.

The first stage of the research includes analyzing the convergent and divergent validity and reliability of the questionnaire and model. The second stage requires the verification of all the assumptions of the study by conducting tests with the software. In this study, SPSS23 and SMART PLS software were used for data analysis.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The demographic specifications of the respondents in this research are provided in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographic specifications of the respondents.

Variable

N

%

Gender

Female

35

24.8

Male

106

75.2

Education

Diploma

15

10.6

Associate degree

7

5

Bachelor

53

37.6

Masters and above

66

46.8

Work history

< 10 years

11

7.8

10-20 years

49

34.8

> 20 years

81

57.4

Job Category

Managerial

69

48.9

Specialized

64

45.4

Executive

8

5.7

Total

141

100

 

Table 2 reveals the variables and constructs examined in the questionnaire. Considering that the suitable value for Cronbach's alpha is 0.7, for the combined final is 0.7, and for the average variance extracted is 0.5, and based on the findings listed in Table 2, all these criteria have adopted the appropriate value, it can be confirmed the proportion of the final situation and convergent validity of the current study.

Table 2. Variables and Constructs examined in the questionnaire.

Structure

Number of items

Cronbach's alpha

CR (Compound Reliability)

AVE (Average Variance Extracted)

Reference

Distributive justice

5

0.77

0.843

0.520

Niehoff and Moorman (1993)

Procedural justice

3

0.899

0.936

0.831

Tekleab, Takeughi, and Taylor (2005)

Interactive justice

6

0.896

0.921

0.661

Aryee, Budhwar, and Chen (2002)

Job Commitment

10

0.91

0.931

0.57

Kanungo (1982)

Organizational citizenship behavior

10

0.90

0.922

0.54

Randall, Fedor, and Longenecker (1990)

 

To evaluate the construct's differential validity with reflective indices, the average explained variance must be greater than the square of the correlations between the construct and other constructs that make up the model. Because the constructs are by this condition, it indicates the validity of acceptable variance (Table 3).

 

Table 3. Divergent validity for the measurement model.

Structure

Distributive justice

Procedural justice

Interactive justice

Job Commitment

Organizational citizenship behavior

Distributive justice

0.721

-

-

-

-

Procedural justice

0.47

0.911

-

-

-

Interactive justice

0.624

0.56

0.813

-

-

Job Commitment

0.65

0.482

0.730

0.754

-

Organizational citizenship behavior

0.674

0.56

0.683

0.71

0.734

 

After the psychological and final description of the measurement model, here the test of the conceptual model of the study is done by standard regression weights (or path coefficients) and described variance (R2) related to endogenous (dependent) variables. If a variable does not have the minimum threshold desired by Falk and Miller (1992) of 0.1 for explained variance, it demonstrates that this variable is bound to other factors that are not included in this research. Table 4 states that both endogenous (dependent) variables have obtained the desired minimum value.

Table 4. Explained variance related to dependent variables.

Endogenous structures

R2

Job Commitment

0.596

Organizational citizenship behavior

0.651

The most important criterion for determining the relationship between structural parts (structures in the model) is significant numbers. If these numbers value exceeds 1.96, 2.57, and 3.27, it shows the correctness of the relationship between the constructs because of confirms the study hypotheses at the confidence level of 95, 99, and 99.9 percent. To test whether justice can affect job commitment and organizational citizenship behavior or not, the presented hypotheses have been determined by the test of significant coefficients. The test results are presented in Table 5.

Table 5. Test results summary.

Assumptions

Relationships

Path coefficient (β)

T-value

Results

1

Distributive Justice Job Commitment

0.309

3.987

Approved

2

Procedural Justice Job Commitment

0.053

0.951

Not approved

3

Interactional Justice Job Commitment

0.507

6.085

Approved

4

Job commitment Organizational citizenship behavior

0.807

25.097

Approved

 

To determine the overall fit of the model, the GOF (Goodness of Fit) index has been used. Volterra et al. have introduced three 0.36, 0.25, and 0.01 values as strong, medium, and weak values ​​for GOF. The relationship for calculating GOF is:

 

GoF =Communality ×R2

(1)

Therefore, according to Eq. 1, the GOF value is equal to GoF = 0.6277 ×0.6235  = 0.6256, which indicates a very good fit for the model.

The findings of our research revealed that job commitment has a positive relationship with the organizational citizenship behavior of IT employees. Overall, there is a positive relationship between job commitment and perceived justice among IT employees; however, only interactional justice and distributive justice are significant. According to a previous study, from the point of IT employees' view, organizational policies are considered less important incentives for their jobs. Therefore, procedural justice is expected to be less effective than the other two justices on job commitment. Based on Field Theory, a person's behavior is mainly affected by factors from the environment that are adjacent and prominent (Vandenberghe et al., 2004; Juaneda-Ayensa et al., 2017; Vandenberghe et al., 2017; Houle et al., 2023; Godbersen et al., 2024). Fairness and justice are more effective than the processes themselves.

The results of the present study provided new insights. At first, the relationship between each type of organizational justice and the job commitment of the development team members was investigated. This job commitment is under the influence of people's perception of organizational justice (fair or unfair treatment of people). IT managers should focus on not only people’s skills in performing tasks but also their requirements to develop the probability of IT project success. In addition, in the investigation of distributive justice, the assignment of duties in job behaviors should also be considered. In reality, the project manager, in the sense that interactional justice is also involved, makes decisions regarding the assignment of tasks. Finally, since job commitment is an individual specification, it is less probably to be affected by organizational factors. Nevertheless, the present study revealed that organizational factors in the justice form affect job commitment (Vanhala et al., 2016; Santana-Martins et al., 2022).

According to information technology project managers, leadership and management functions should be changed by an organization. Lack of justice perception (lack of fair behavior) will lead to a decrease in job commitment and lower performance. When delegating tasks, project managers should also consider internal and growth needs, which have the potential to fulfill outstanding and important needs. The failure to raise the perception of justice (that is, employees feel that they are treated fairly) can lead to obvious behaviors that reduce the desire and enthusiasm of employees to share vital knowledge and information (doing this without useless and worthless) and performance is undermined due to lack of motivation, interest, presence, and effort. There are various perceptions among the team members and management, so the expectations should be clearly stated to avoid the perception that unfair distribution has taken place. Accomplishments and successes should be appreciated to help increase the level of work commitment (Huemann et al., 2007; Fornes et al., 2008; Gamble & Tian, 2015).

Project managers should participate in employee review sessions to increase their understanding of justice and make them understand the manager's fair treatment. In the process of making decisions regarding promotions and other tangible and obvious consequences, the manager should have the most contact and communication with the employees. Matrix organizations must certify that all management communications have proper internal data. Organizations should not centralize decisions about performance rewards, while interactions are decentralized. Inappropriate participation is likely to be considered a procedural injustice. In the training, the project manager should use techniques to ask the opinion of employees about justice (fairness of behavior) and to identify the source of injustice (Utami et al., 2014; Pan et al., 2018; Hermanto & Srimulyani, 2022).

According to the creation and establishment of organizational justice, organizational citizenship behaviors can be created. In particular, the organization should centralize a rewards-fair distribution and provide quick and favorable access to management, supervisors, and peers. By doing so, interactional and distributive justice are enhanced and job commitment is increased, which in turn strengthens organizational citizenship behavior.

CONCLUSION

To determine whether justice can cause favorable behavior and attitudes in this new context, a survey was conducted among members of Information Technology development projects. Data from 141 respondents in project teams showed that justice, as measured by employees' perceptions of justice, increased job commitment. Job commitment acts as a mediator between justice and organizational citizenship behaviors. Therefore, project leaders should strive to increase people's perception of fairness in the distribution of behaviors and rewards.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: None

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: None

FINANCIAL SUPPORT: None

ETHICS STATEMENT: None

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How to cite this article
Vancouver
Joungtrakul J, Smith ID. Examining the Effect of Organizational Justice on Organizational Citizenship Behavior Through the Mediation of Job Commitment. J Organ Behav Res. 2024;9(2):105-13. https://doi.org/10.51847/PfxUhbw9xY
APA
Joungtrakul, J., & Smith, I. D. (2024). Examining the Effect of Organizational Justice on Organizational Citizenship Behavior Through the Mediation of Job Commitment. Journal of Organizational Behavior Research, 9(2), 105-113. https://doi.org/10.51847/PfxUhbw9xY
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