Tell me who works for you, I'll tell you how it will react: The role of personal characteristics on Organizational Injustice Reactions

Abstract

Introduction: How do employees respond to organizational injustice? Situations of organizational change are conducive to elicit feelings of organizational injustice. These feelings can lead employees to engage in retaliations or reinvestments behaviors. The Human Resources challenge is to understand how employees will perceive the situation to anticipate their reactions in order to manage them. However all employees do not react in the same way to these organizational situations. While many studies have tested separately the predictive role of personal characteristics like self-evaluation criterions, personality traits and personal values in achieving organizational behavior, rare are those who studied them together.). Our research aims to assess the impact of some specific personal characteristics (self-esteem, locus of control, big-five traits and Schwartz values) in organizational injustice reactions (retaliation and/or reinvestment). Methodology: Based on a questionnaire completed by 121 participants, assessing their personal characteristics and types of reactions to organizational injustice, Results: We found that conscientiousness and agreeableness traits and some personal values such as power and autonomy have an important impact on organizational injustice responses. Conclusions: The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are further discussed.