Organizational Injustice and Work Alienation

Organizational justice is argued to be related to several work attitudes and behaviors such as job satisfaction, turnover intention, absenteeism, organizational commitment, workplace aggression, job stress, and managerial and organizational trust. A great deal of research also addressed work alienation in different research areas such as organizational leadership, organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, and work experience and drinking behavior. However, any study couldn’t be found examined the organizational injustice and work alienation relationship. This paper aims to measure the relationship between perceptions of organizational injustice and work alienation. Four dimensions of organizational injustice were examined: distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational injustice. For this study, two dimensions of work alienation namely powerlessness, and social isolation were addressed. Organizational injustice and work alienation relationship was examined among health care professions (doctors and nurses) in Turkey. Because health care sector has been one of the most important, and rapidly growing industry, and several complaints especially related with pay and working conditions have emerged in recent years among these professionals. It is hyphotesized that organizational injustice will cause work alienation and tested these relationships in a sample of 377 health care professionals from public and private hospitals in Istanbul. The results revealed that each of the organizational injustice dimensions were associated with work alienation dimensions. Distributive injustice had the weakest relationship with both powerlessness and social isolation. Procedural injustice was the strongest predictor of powerlessness, but the strongest predictor of social isolation was informational injustice. The theoretical and practical implications of this results were discussed below.