A Study of the Impact of Perceived Organizational Justice on Employee\\\'s Social Capital (Case Study: Health Network of Noshahr City)

• Main Authors: Ali Nasr Esfahani, Javad Shabani Naftchali, Javad Khazaei Pool
• Format: Article
• Language: fas
• Published: University of Isfahan 2013-07-01
• Series: جامعه شناسی کاربردی
• Subjects: Organizational justice; Distributive justice; Procedural justice; Interactional justice; Social capital
• Online Access: http://uijs.ui.ac.ir/jas/browse.php?a_code=A-10-1-172&slc_lang=en&sid=1

Introduction In recent years, increasing attention to the issue of organizational justice and its impacts on organizational outcome has urged organizations to strive for organizational justice in order to survive and reach their objectives. Perceiving injustice has a destructive impact on teamwork spirit and motivation of employees. Injustice and unfair distribution of organization's outputs and achievements demoralize employees and diminish their motivation to be active and assiduous. Besides, it probably reduces performance, production and commitment to the organization. In fact, justice does not mean to assign a single standard for all members. Rather, it means that we must enact responsibilities in certain conditions and act upon them in a fair way. Organizational justice determines how the employees must be treated so they feel they are being treated with justice. According to Lopaciuk (2011, p.63), while organizational justice have a positive effect on an organization's manpower in achieving objectives of employees and the organization, the employees' social capital is also instrumental in a way that chances of success in an organization with high levels of social capital is much more than those organization in which social capital is low. Social capital is a kind of latent wealth and property which is the result of mental preparedness of members of a society to give up their personal interests and engage in collaborative action. It could be considered as a manageable phenomenon in the sense that we can restructure it according to policies of the organization or help the process of its formation. Unlike other kinds of capital, social capital does not exist physically. Rather, it is the result of group and social norms and interactions whose increase causes the reduction of operational costs of the organization. Social capital is generative in nature and urges people to preserve values, perform tasks correctly, reach their goals and accomplish their life plans. In other words, no person or organization could succeed without social capital. Because it is related to perceived sense of injustice, this study attempts to discuss the establishment of justice in organization and employees' opinion on this issue as an effective factor regarding the amount of employees' social capital in the organization. The results, if proven, could help managers employ people with more social capital and hence achieve more success by establishing organizational justice. Material and Method The present study is an applied and descriptive research attempting to offer a clear definition for the correlation of perceived organizational justice and the amount of personnel's social capital. This is a cross sectional field research. For testing empirical data, a conceptual model was designed by the authors. This model has two main parts, including organizational justice and social capital. In order to reach to research objectives, four hypotheses have been tested, investigating the relationship between perceived organizational justice and its dimensions (distributive, procedural and interactional justice) with the amount of employees' social capital. Research population is composed of the personnel of the health network in Noshahr city, of whom 136 individuals were sampled randomly. For data collection, a questionnaire was made by the researchers containing 31 questions based on Likert's five-degree scale. 15 of the questions include aspects of organizational justice and the other 16 questions are relate to aspects of social capital. The questionnaire has a high reliability (0.91) which was calculated by Cronbach's alpha. Also, the content validity of the questionnaire has been assured by using advice from experts. SPSS software was used for data analysis. The statistical methods used in this research include descriptive statistical methods (such as mean and single sample tables) and inferential statistics, including Pearson's correlation coefficient. Discussion of Results & Conclusions Testing of the main hypotheses of the study shows, with 95% of precision, that there is a significant and positive correlation between perceived organizational justice and the amount of social capital in the sense that employees'' positive perception of organizational justice could increase their amount of social capital. Therefore, we can say that not only people with more social capital can better trust other members of their organization, but they can also trust members of other groups and organizations as well, participating in political cooperation, and becoming members of different groups and associations. They can also help to establish trust and uplift the organization's reputation, establish informal relationships in the organization, create empathy among the members and work in teams to perform their tasks. According to the results, striving to increase justice in organizations is one of the most significant factors which help organizations create an environment full of social capital and make great achievements as well as enjoying the benefits of organizational justice. They could also have a greater influence on the amount of employees' social capital by improving their positive perception of the administrators' just behavior (interactional justice). The researchers have reached a consensus that distributive justice leads to organizational effectiveness. By increasing the perception of procedural justice, employees obtain a positive view of the organization and its managers even if they are dissatisfied with payments, promotions and other personal benefits. In addition, procedural justice influences employees' confidence in organization and encourages them to remain in the organization. Various studies have shown that those organizations in which high levels of social capital exist have better organizational performance and hence are more successful in competition with their rivals. Therefore, social capital is the pivot of management issues and those managers who can produce more social capital are considered successful. Studies show that employees' opinion regarding degree of respecting justice in the organization influences attitudes such as organizational commitment and the legitimacy of people in authority. In addition, when employees feel that the organizational procedures and outcomes are unfair, they probably have a weaker performance. This behavior might also damage the process of social capital development in the organization. So all organizations in general and the health network in particular, must do their best to empower the process of justice in distributing outcomes, procedures and social interactions. We recommend that a cultural organization will be established to facilitate the development of employees' social capital and to include social capital indexes in the performance and reward assessment systems of organizations. Administrators can affect their employees' social capital through improvement of the relationship between their subordinates, partnerships, flexible and democratic structures, clear appraisals, fair treatments and empowerment of the employees. A careful study of these factors may reveals different types of justice in each of them.