The measurement of organizational justice in organizational change programmes: A reliability, validity and context‐sensitivity assessment

Abstract

This study identified relevant content for standardized measures of organizational justice and evaluated the reliability, validity and context sensitivity of measures of procedural, interactional and distributive justice that assess the perceived fairness of organizational change programmes. Two organizations that were undergoing changes that differed in the severity and permanence of employee outcomes participated in the research. After refinement on the basis of test‐retest reliability and factor analysis, the procedural and interactional justice measures demonstrated good reliability and validity, but the equity‐based items that operationalized distributive justice performed poorly. The results offer some support for concerns over possible context‐sensitivity of justice perceptions and emphasize the need for a comprehensive set of standardized measures that can be customized to assess and compare justice perceptions in different organizational contexts. Directions for further research and measurement development are discussed.