Organizational Justice Dimensions and Employee Outcomes: The Mediating Influence of Emotional Intelligence in Universities

Abstract

Organizational justice has become an important issue of employee attitudes and performance especially in knowledge-intensive organizations like educational institutions. Although much has been studied about organizational justice and performance of an employee, few empirical studies have been done on the psychological processes by which justice perceptions create effects on the performance outcomes more particularly to the setting of a developing country academic institution. To fill this gap, the current paper focuses on how emotional intelligence mediates between organizational justice and employee performance amongst university workers in Dera Ismail Khan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan.

The research design is quantitative research design that consists of a structured questionnaire that is based on the established and validated measurement scales. They used 208 academic and administrative employees who are employed in both a public and a private university to collect the data. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, multiple regression analysis and mediation analysis with Hayes PROCESS Macro Model 4 were done through statistical analysis.

According to the findings, the organizational justice has a positive and significant impact on employee performance. All the three components of the distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice showed a significant positive correlation with emotional intelligence and also with employee performance. The findings also indicate that emotional intelligence moderates the connection between organizational justice and employee performance to some extent, implying that emotionally intelligent employees have more chances to interpret the perception of fairness into better work performance.

The research will help in the body of organizational behavior because it will empirically prove the concept of emotional intelligence as a psychological process that connects the perception of fairness to performance outcomes in institutions of higher learning. Practically speaking, the results imply that universities ought to enhance the open decision making procedures, encourage the practice of fair treatment, and invest in emotional intelligence development schemes to make employees more effective.

The study can offer valuable information to policymakers, university administrators, and human resource practitioners who want to enhance employee performance by using management practices that are fair and the development of emotional capabilities. The paper also generalizes organizational justice literature to the context of institutions of higher learning in third world countries that have underrepresented the research.