Relationship between Organisational Justice and Commitment: Role of Leader-Member Exchange

Abstract

Existing research indicates that leader-member exchange (LMX) mediates the relationship between interactional justice and various outcomes, without studying mediation separately for the two components of interactional justice-interpersonal and informational. In one study on interpersonal justice, LMX was found to moderate its relationship with felt obligation. Evidence also links interactional justice to organisation-referenced outcomes like commitment, beyond higher unique effects on supervisor-referenced outcomes like LMX. The present research attempts to synthesize these findings by studying all four justice dimensions-distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational. A total of 205 responses were collected from 3 organisations in India. Support was found for the hypothesized role of LMX both as a mediator of the relationship between informational justice and affective commitment, and as a moderator of the association between interpersonal justice and affective commitment. Distributive justice was linked to continuance commitment, as hypothesized. Employees may perceive distributive and procedural justice aspects to be less open to modification, and identify greater opportunity for managerial discretion in the interpersonal and informational aspects. Organisations can benefit by training their managers to ensure fairness in these two important dimensions for creating and maintaining affective commitment, within a given procedural and distributive justice environment.

Keywords: LMX, Justice, Organisational Commitment

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