The effects of distributive and procedural justice on job satisfaction and organizational commitment of correctional staff

Abstract

Correctional staff are expensive, and they perform the most critical and central duty within the facility: the care and custody of inmates. Improving the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of staff is important, as they have been linked to many salient positive outcomes. We explored whether the job satisfaction and organizational commitment of correctional staff were affected by distributive and procedural justice, the two major dimensions of organizational justice, as well as fear of victimization, role overload, and perceptions of training. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression results of 322 survey responses indicated that perceptions of quality training, distributive justice, and procedural justice had significant positive effects on job satisfaction, while role overload had negative effects. For organizational commitment, perceptions of training and procedural justice had significant positive effects. OLS analysis of demographic variables indicated that custody staff and staff with college degrees had lower job satisfaction and lower organizational commitment, while female staff had higher job satisfaction.