The Moderating Effect of Tenure and Gender on the Relationship Between Organizational Justice and Affective Commitment

Abstract

Employees’ emotional commitment to their organizations has powerful implications for the performance and retention of their workforces. Organizational justice is an established antecedent of affective commitment; however, the intricacies of the relationships between the four dimensions of organizational justice (distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational) and affective commitment have been insufficiently explored in existing literature. The present study explored the relative strengths of the relationships between the four types of organizational justice and affective commitment. It was hypothesized that all types of organizational justice would positively relate to employees’ affective commitment. Tenure and gender were also hypothesized to interact with organizational justice such that longer-tenure employees and women would experience a stronger relationship between all types of organizational justice and affective commitment than shorter-tenure employees and men, respectively. A total of 152 survey responses were analyzed to test these hypotheses. Consistent with the hypotheses, all four dimensions of organizational justice were positively related to affective commitment with informational and procedural justice having the strongest relationships, followed by interpersonal and distributive justice. However, no moderation effects were found, suggesting that justice practices of organizations can be executed similarly regardless of the tenure or gender of employees.