An Empirical Study On The Acting Mechanism Thatorganizational Justice Exerts On Employee Engagementin Chinese Culture

A survey from a multinational consulting corporation found, there had been a general trend of decline in employee engagement around the world, especially in china. A2011investigation showed engagement of Chinese employee was15%lower than the global average level. According to social exchange theory (SET), employee engagement is abidirectional concept and to some exchange a reward employees paid to their organization instead of an obligation. When they feel injustice or hard to identify with the moral value in their organization, it will be difficult for them to engage, even getting worse, go slow and withdraw.SET which based on the spirit of contract is a typical western sociological theory.Under the multicultural patternof today’s China, on the one hand, young people have received many modern Western thoughts, and moreseek independence, freedom, fairness and individual interests, among them there are a great deal of oversea returnees, their way of thinking is more westernized. On the other hand, Chinese traditions which emphasizing etiquette, collective, clan, loyalty, piety, benevolence, righteousness and emotional connection are still constitute the main culture and social ideology in the society. Under these two interweaved reasons, there do exists an exchange relationship between organizational justice and employee engagement, but is more likely a situation that organizational justice arousethe loyalty emotion of employees, then this loyalty emotion sparkedtheir engagement behavior. This phenomenon cannotbe explained simply by SET, however, this is just the valueto explain Chinese organizational behaviorfrom the perspective ofSET.This study proposed one hypotheses based on the difference that three variables showed on demograghy, three hypothesesbased on SET, and five hypothesesin the context of Chinese culture, and furthermore, built a multiple mediation model that employee loyalty exerted on the relationship between organizational justice and employee engagement. Using validated scales, this sdudy collected232available questionnaires, and built structural equation models (SEM). These models verified these hypotheses in various degrees, and came to followingfindings:(1) Organizational justice and employee loyalty manifested no significant differences on the demographic variables, while employee engagement showed some remarkable differences on five demographic variables.(2) Organizational justice affect employee engagement and loyalty significantly, which is consistent with the key point of SET. But there exist some different outcomes in Chinese culture compared with western culture, distributive justice impact less significantly on employee engagement in Chinese culture, while procedures, interpersonal, information justicehave a remarkable influenceon employee engagement, even more, the force of interpersonal and information justice are slightly larger than procedural justice.(3) In current context of Chinese culture, the impactorganizational justice exerts onemployee engagement are partialy from direct impact-which reflects the exchange characteristics of fairness and reciprocal, and partialyfrom indirect effects of employee loyalty-which reflects Chinese traditional characteristics of loyalty, piety, benevolence, righteousnessand emotional connection.(4) The five dimensions of Employee loyalty havedifferent multiple mediate effects on the relationship of the four dimensions of organizational justice and employee engagement indegree and orientation. Something which need to pay much intention on is, maintain interpersonal harmonyshowed negativemediate effects between procedural, interpersonal, information justice and employee engagementbecause of "loyalty to people" in Chinese culture. Among the positive mediate effects of the other four dimensions of employee loyalty, identify with organization culture revealed the greatest mediate effects, willing to dedicate and sacrifice least.On the ground of research findings, this study put out severalrecommendations for management practice, and finally, made a prospect to the possible future study. There are three innovations:First, exploredthe influence that organizational justice exerts on employee engagementbased onSET; Second, introduce employee loyalty as mediate variable on the ground of Chinese culture, and explored the multiple mediate effects of five dimentions of employee loyalty to the relationship between four dimentions of organizational justice and employee engagement; Third, verified the differences that organizational justice, employee engagement and loyalty showed in diverse demographic variables in Chinese culture.