Quality of supervisor-subordinate relationship, cultural values, and organizational justice

Abstract

Organizational justice literature indicates that high quality relationships will result in more favorable treatment of the individual. However, little has been done regarding how relationships with the supervisor (i.e., ingroup/outgroup identification, leader-member exchange, and guanxi: a Chinese concept for interpersonal relationship) can influence the effects of organizational justice on employees’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, trust in the supervisor, and trust in the organization. Thus, the first purpose of this dissertation is to examine how different relationships with the supervisor influence the effects of organizational justice on individual and organizational outcomes. Further, most of the current research on organizational justice is done in the U.S. culture. But, there is still doubt that employees recognize principles of justice the same across all cultures, and that organizational justice would have the same consequences on affected employees. The second purpose of my dissertation is to investigate how the relationships between organizational justice and its consequences vary among employees with different cultural values, specifically in the U.S. and China. Finally, I explore the potential three-way interaction of relationships with supervisors, cultural values, and organizational justice on key outcomes. Specifically, I hypothesized that supervisor-subordinate relationships and cultural values will each separately moderate the effects of organizational justice on outcome variables. In addition, I hypothesized that there will be joint moderating effects of supervisor-subordinate relationships and cultural values on the influence of organizational justice. Data were collected from the U.S. and China to test the hypotheses of the present study. Results from hierarchical linear regression showed that only a small percent of hypothesized effects was significant and there was no strong evidence to support hypotheses. However, there were also some interesting results. LMX, guanxi, and ingroup identification all exhibited some extent of moderating roles on the effects of organizational justice, suggesting a multi-dimensional supervisor-subordinate relationship. Cultural values did not show much moderating effects as predicted. Threeway interactions among organizational justice, supervisor-subordinate relationships, and cultural values were more complex and did not show a consistent pattern. Possible explanations for these results and limitations were discussed. Contribution to the literature, practical implications, and future research were also addressed.