The Role of Justice Judgments in Explaining the Relationship between Job Satisfaction and Organizational Commitment

The organizational literature includes a number of studies examining the relationship between satisfaction and commitment. In all, the discrepant findings characteristic of this research seem to be a function of both the range of independent variables used by researchers to model the satisfaction-commitment relationship and the choice of satisfaction-commitment measures. We argue generally that justice judgments are central to the development of satisfaction and commitment. Specifically, the literature suggests that procedural justice is closely related to "global" evaluations of systems, leaders, and institutions (e.g., commitment); whereas distributive justice is closely linked to evaluations of "specific" personally relevant outcomes (e.g., facet satisfaction). Four competing models linking distributive and procedural justice to employee satisfaction and commitment were tested using confirmatory analytic techniques. Results suggest that, when considering the role of justice judgments, satisfaction and commitment are causally independent. Implications for both managerial practice and further research are discussed.