Fairness in Chinese Organizations

This study examined the roles of organizational justice and individual cultural characteristics in affecting employees\u27 work attitudes and behaviors, in particular, the contextual aspect of job performance in Chinese organizations. Data were collected from 232 employee-supervisor dyads in three Sino-western joint ventures in the People\u27s Republic of China. Results indicated that distributive justice had a significant impact on one dimension of contextual job performance, i.e., interpersonal facilitation, and various attitudinal outcomes, such as job satisfaction, pay satisfaction, affective commitment and turnover intention. Among the three procedural justice variables (participation at company level, participation at job level, and appeal mechanism) examined, only participation at company level was found to have a significant but less powerful effect on one of the attitudinal outcomes, affective commitment. None of the three procedural justice variables had a significantly positive impact on contextual performance. Contrary to the hypothesis, participation at company level was found to have a negative effect on supporting organization. Collectivism was found to have a negative impact on contextual performance; its level did not moderate the relationship between justice and contextual performance. Finally, the results provided some support for the hypothesis that power distance moderated procedural justice-outcome relationships. Specifically, the results showed that, for people with high power distance, participation (either at company policy making level and daily work activity level) tended to negatively correlate with such job behaviors as task performance and job initiative. In contrast, for people with low power distance values, participation had a small and positive correlation with task performance and job initiative