The Study On The Mechanism Of Employee's Perception Of Distributive Justice

Justice is an important topic in the field of organizational behavior and human resource management. It has great influence on both employee and organization. The aim of this dissertation focuses on the topic of Chinese employee's perception of distributive justice; it is a practical problem in the background of Chinese economic transition.In the first part of this dissertation, it outlined research background, significance, scope, method, framework and innovation points. Meanwhile, it defined and elaborated several basic concepts such as distributive justice. The purpose of this part is to direct and arrange the whole dissertation in general.In second part, it reviewed and summarized literatures relating to distributive justice, organizational justice, social comparison and referent selection. It reviewed the development of the equity theory and the theory of organizational justice, and analyzed the specific value of Chinese fairness firstly. Second, it reviewed the literature of social comparison, and introduced four kinds of social comparison: parallel social comparison, upward social comparison, downward social comparison and constructive social comparison. Then, the literatures about the issue of referent were reviewed. The classification, characters and stability of referent was introduced. The influence factors of referent selection, such as motives, demography, environment and cognition, were discussed. At last, the problem of previous study was discussed.In the third part, there were three studies to answer three questions about distributive justice were respectively: how the Chinese employee chooses referents; the mechanism of organizational employee's internal distributive justice; the information processing for the external referents.Qualitative method was used to analyses how Chinese employees choose referent, 20 employees were interviewed, and the following two characteristics have been found: the comparison was found among different groups rather than among individuals. The reason that a group was chosen is "comparability", which included not only the element of relevance, but also the element of feasibility. Ability, intention and background were origins of feasibility.Questionnaire was used for the research of organizational employee's internal distributive justice. Based on literature review and theoretic analysis, the concept of policy justice was proposed. Following the steps of item collection, explorative factor analysis and confirmative factor analysis, a 6-item policy justice scale was developed. To explore the relationship between policy justice and distributive justice, a questionnaire survey was employed, and 302 MBA students participated. It was found that, by dominance analysis and hierarchical regression analysis, the factor which affects the distributive justice the most was policy justice instead of procedural justice or the interpersonal justice and informational justice, and the effect of procedural and interpersonal justice on distributive justice was significant only on the condition of policy injustice. This phenomenon may have something to do with China's economic restructuring and the lower level of organizational management.The effect of external referents on distributive justice was examined by scenario experiment. 328 college students participated, and a 4×2×2 design was employed. The results indicated that the most important factor (greatestη2) was the average level of referents; when subjects were told that a given referent were paid more, their perception of distributive justice decreased sharply (bandwagon effect); when subjects knew a given referent is paid less, their distributive justice promoted dramatically (snob effect), but this effect was significant only under the condition of average level information was absent.Finally, it summarized the whole dissertation and indicated directions for the future study.