Does Organizational Justice Influence Employee Innovative Behavior in an Arabic Context? Evidence From the Libyan Oil Industry

Ali Fadul

doi:10.1177/21582440211043931

Abstract

Innovative employees are the main source of an organization’s survival in a dynamic environment. Therefore, understanding how to stimulate and sustain employee innovative behaviors is of great importance for organizations. From this perspective, based on the social exchange theory, the current study seeks to investigate the influence of organizational justice on employee innovative behavior within the Libyan context. Through a pre-designed questionnaire, data were gathered from 295 employees working for 5 Libyan national oil companies and analyzed using partial least squares—structural equation modeling [PLS]. The results indicated that procedural justice is positively related to employee innovative behavior, whereas distributive justice and interactional justice are not. The findings foster the assumption that organizational justice perceptions and responses differ across cultures based on national values. The results and implications are discussed in light of the literature and the Libyan work environment and culture.

Highlights

Petroleum is the most important source of energy and provides over 50% of all commercial energy consumption worldwide (Jegede et al, 2013)
The significance of procedural justice on the employees’ outcomes among the three dimensions of organizational justices addresses the concern of Young (2012) who argued that investigating one or two dimensions of organizational justice might not provide a comprehensive understanding on the relationship between organizational justice and employees’ outcomes
In response to the call by Almansour and Minai (2012) and Elamin and Tlaiss (2015) to conduct this investigation within Arab environment, this study has demonstrated that the social exchange theory (SET) theory sufficiently explained the significance of procedural justice as an antecedent of innovative work behavior in

Summary

Introduction

Petroleum is the most important source of energy and provides over 50% of all commercial energy consumption worldwide (Jegede et al, 2013). In the business environment featuring sharp competition (Andronova, 2017), continuous unstable oil prices, high costs, and growing complexity, the need for innovation has become an imperious need for oil companies (Swart & Otremba, 2016). Innovation within the oil industry involves high-performance solutions to increase productivity, reduce costs, save time, gain efficiency, and sustain growth (Hassani et al, 2017). Organizations are required to boost their employee’s innovative capabilities and behaviors (Hakimian et al, 2016). Employee innovative behavior (EIB) is a major source of value for organizations (Bysted & Hansen, 2015), it is seen as an important asset for organizations and considered as a key determinant for their survival in a dynamic environment (Akram et al, 2016). Identifying the latter’s antecedents is considered an important research area (Bani-Melhem et al, 2018; Engelen et al, 2018; Hakimian et al, 2016) that requires further investigations (Agarwal et al, 2012)

Methods

Results

Conclusion