Examining the empirical redundancy of organizational justice constructs

Justice scholars have raised concerns about the potential redundancy of organizational justice constructs as their measures were often found to be highly correlated with one another. However, investigation into the problem has been difficult because measurement artifacts attenuated correlations between measures, masking the true extent of construct overlaps. Applying a recent methodological advance that allows correcting for the biasing effect of measurement artifacts, we conducted two studies to examine the question of empirical redundancy of major justice constructs: distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, and overall justice. The studies yielded very similar results: the constructs underlying typical measures of organizational justice were highly correlated, with construct-level correlations ranging from 0.83 to 0.94. They also had the same pattern of relationships with other constructs in their nomological networks. Using Fairness Heuristic Theory (Lind, 2001; Van den Bos, 2001), we explained how the current results can be reconciled with past research regarding the dimensionality of organizational justice. We further discussed how the results can bring in new perspective to interpret past findings in organizational justice research and offer practical implications to organizations.