THE EFFECT OF ORGANIZATIONAL JUSTICE ON EMOTIONAL EXHAUSTION: THE CASE OF HEALTH EMPLOYEES

Abstract

It will be tried to point out the issues of justice and burnout in the health sector, due to the inability of healthcare workers to obtain their material and moral rights in Türkiye, whose workload and work-related problems have become more evident with the pandemic, and the impact of the physical and psychological violence they encounter. In this context, purpose of the research is to examine the effect of organizational justice perception on emotional burnout. The research data required for this purpose was obtained from 141 health officers working in a research hospital in Ankara by face-to-face survey method in November-December 2022. Turkish adaptation made by Yıldırım (2007) of the organizational justice perception scale, which consists of 3 dimensions: distributive, interactional and procedural justice and contains 20 items, developed by Niehoff and Moorman (1993), which has been widely used in the literature in order to evaluate employees’ perception of organizational justice, was used. In order to evaluate employees’ perceptions of emotional exhaustion, 9 items from the scale published in the literature as the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which consists of 3 dimensions and 22 items developed by Maslach and Jackson (1981), were used and the Turkish adaptation of the emotional exhaustion dimension was made by Ergin (1992). The scales used to collect data were primarily subjected to confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using the MPlus 7 package program. After the CFA along with the goodness of the scales’ fit values, effect of organizational justice on emotional burnout was tested with SEM (structural equation model) analysis. The result revealed that the perception of organizational justice affects emotional burnout in a significant and negative way. Research results reveal the benefit of investigating relation between organizational justice and burnout in the healthcare sector. In this context, the research is important in terms of understanding the employees in the sector and the subjective well-being of the sector.