When Employees Experience Low Levels of Job Autonomy, Fair Procedures Buffer Unfair Outcomes

Abstract

Organizations play a key role in maintaining employee wellbeing. Some research suggests that one way to protect employee wellbeing is to treat them fairly (procedural justice), especially when fair job outcomes (distributive justice) cannot be ensured. Yet, previous studies have not consistently found this interaction effect between distributive and procedural justice. This study investigates job autonomy as a boundary condition to the Distributive Justice × Procedural Justice effect on wellbeing outcomes. To test our hypothesized three-way interaction between distributive justice, procedural justice, and job autonomy, we collected cross-sectional data among Dutch employees in two studies. We used validated self-report measures of our core constructs to test our hypothesis on two employee wellbeing indicators: job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Results show a significant three-way interaction effect on both job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion in Study 1 (N = 411), and a significant three-way interaction effect on emotional exhaustion in Study 2 (N = 1117). Simple slopes analyses of the significant three-way interactions showed that distributive justice and procedural justice interact to predict wellbeing outcomes among employees with low job autonomy. Among employees with high job autonomy, distributive justice and procedural justice do not interact to predict wellbeing. The results contribute to the employee wellbeing literature by showing that job autonomy is a boundary condition to the Distributive Justice × Procedural Justice effect on wellbeing outcomes. We discuss other implications of our findings for the workplace and the ramifications for employees with low and high job autonomy.

Keywords: distributive justice; emotional exhaustion; job autonomy; job satisfaction; procedural justice.