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The relationship between Organizational

justice and job
organizational justice and satisfaction
job satisfaction
Evidence from China 115
Yunhong Hao, Jie Hao and Xiaochen Wang Received 16 October 2014
School of Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Accepted 18 October 2016

Hangzhou, China

Abstract
Purpose – Focusing on the corporations in China and aiming to figure out the significant connection
between organizational justice perception and job satisfaction from Chinese setting, this study aimed to
examine the effects of organizational justice upon job satisfaction of the full-time and part-time
employees in the state owned enterprise (SOEs) and primate Chinese companies.
Design/methodology/approach – The study adopted the questionnaire to investigate more than
300 employees, and the empirical data of this paper is based on statistical analysis, such as confirmatory
factor analysis, correlational and regression analysis.
Findings – The paper arrives at the conclusion that in SOEs, the employees’ perception about
procedural justice was higher than distributive justice. While in private enterprises, the procedural
justice and interactive justice were tested to have similar coefficients. The relationship between
organizational justice and job satisfaction differed between full-time employees and part-time
employees.
Practical implications – This study opens a new window for understanding how organizational
justice influences employees’ job satisfaction in Chinese context, taking a further step to explore the
different impacts of organizational justice on job satisfaction among different types of employees.
Originality/value – This paper collected data from both SOE and private companies in China,
increasing the external validity of the findings. Meanwhile, the authors observed consistent findings
with the studies in Western Society, which increase the generalization of our findings as well. The
findings highlight the value of integrating literatures on organizational justice and job satisfaction.
Keywords Organizational justice, Job satisfaction, Distributive justice, Procedural justice,
Organizational performance, Interactional justice
Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction
Researchers have suggested that organizational justice was related with job satisfaction of
employees and to be considered as the key variable to affect the performance (Du et al., 2005;
Loi et al., 2009; Zainalipour et al., 2010). Then, corporations paid enough attention to build
and maintain organizational justice climate, and this will result in good performance in
motivating employees. Till now, researchers have demonstrated the connection between
Journal of Chinese Human
Resource Management
Vol. 7 No. 2, 2016
This study was financially supported by the grant of The National Natural Science Funds (Project pp. 115-128
No: 71272143, 71072136 and 71202080) and the grant of Natural Science Funds of Zhejiang © Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2040-8005
Province (Projects No: LY16G020006). DOI 10.1108/JCHRM-07-2016-0012
JCHRM organizational justice and job satisfaction; however, they paid little attention on validating
7,2 the similar connection within the context of Chinese corporations. With the rapid
development, China has become one of the biggest economy entities in the world. However,
the culture in China is quite different from western countries. Thus, it is worthy to examine
this topic in Chinese setting. In addition, researchers have examined this relationship
without discussing the distinction among different types of companies and employees.
116 Research on organizational justice had shown that the perception of organizational
justice strongly affected the attitude of workers – job satisfaction, turnover intentions
and organizational commitment (Colquitt et al., 2001). In this article, job satisfaction is
mainly driven from factors such as salary, the design of the work, promotion
opportunities, quality of supervisor and co-workers. A comparison is also developed
that shows the impact on the relationship between the variables as the type of
employees, type of organization and the background culture changes. Although the
associations between organizational justice and various work outcomes are well
established in western literature, very few studies have examined the relationship of
justice perceptions with work attitude and work behavior in the Chinese setting. The
present study aims to find the relationship between justice perceptions and job
satisfaction of employees in Chinese companies.

2. Theoretical background and hypotheses

A brief literature review that follows touches upon some of the key concepts pertaining to the
literature of organizational justice and job satisfaction. Some of the keys studies that focus on
the relationship between the two bodies of literature are also presented. This discussion
leads to the development of hypotheses for this current study.

2.1 Organizational justice

Organizational justice was defined as people’s internal and external perception about
justice toward organizational roles and missions (Greenbery, 1987). It has been widely
accepted that organizational justice has three dimensions, namely, distributive justice,
procedural justice and interactional justice.
2.1.1 Distributive justice. From 1950s to 1970s, the study of justice was primarily
concerned with distributive justice. Early concepts about distributive justice were related to
a fair distribution of rewards (Colquitt et al., 2005). From an exchange perspective, Homans
(1961) proposed that the different people or organizations in social exchange relationship
might have different perception about distributive justice based on their different subjective
nature. Blau (1964) agreed with Homans’s theory and added that satisfaction with exchange
relationships was related with the benefits received and the expectations of the parties.
Adams (1965) stated that workers are concerned not only about their absolute earnings but
also about the comparative salary. Employees tended to compare their salary and inputs
with others. As a consequence, people might feel as being inequitably treated, which was
directly connected with their perception of justice and might impact their job satisfaction.
The key contribution of Adams was that he also discussed the subsequent situation after
inequity in detail. The above theories are all about the distribution outcome and focus on the
perception about the result of resource allocation.
2.1.2 Procedural justice. Thibaut and Walker’s (1975) introduced the study of process
to the literature on justice. They stated that “legitimacy to process fairness as an area of
inquiry” (Colquitt et al., 2005). Leventhal (1980) agreed that procedural justice should be
regarded as the second category of justice rules. Leventhal (1980) also figured out the Organizational
seven procedural components, which included: justice and job
[…] the selection of agents, the setting of ground rules, the gathering of information, the satisfaction
outlining of the structure for making the decision, the granting of appeals, the building in of
safeguards and the use of changing mechanisms.
Folger and Greenberg (1985) agreed that procedural justice could help in making
performance evaluation being fairer because this allowed employees to take part in appraisal 117
stage (Colquitt et al., 2005). Their research suggested that disputants were willing to give up
control in the decision stage as long as they retained control in the process stage.
2.1.3 Interactional justice. Bies and Moag (1986) explained that fairness might be
characterized not only in the structural manner which was suggested in previous
research on distributive justice and procedural justice but also in interpersonal terms.
They introduced interactional justice in detail by focusing attention on the importance
of the quality of the interpersonal treatment people received when procedures were
implemented. Colquitt et al. (2001) supported that interactive justice was distinct from
procedural justice and related with people’s psychological feelings. He further argued
that the interactive justice should be separated into two parts as interpersonal justice
and information justice (Colquitt et al., 2001). The interpersonal justice reflected the
degree to which people were treated with politeness, dignity and respect by authorities.
And the informational justices focused on the explanations provided to people that
conveyed information about why procedures were used in a certain way or why
outcomes were distributed in a certain fashion. Both forms of interactional justice
predicted a variety of organizational variables.

2.2 Job satisfaction

Job satisfaction according to Robbins (2006) is an attitude toward one’s job, the
difference between the amount of rewards that a worker received and the amount of
reward that they believed should be accepted. Job satisfaction is a broad conception
which is used in many fields to describe or measure people’s feeling toward one
organization’s turnover, performance, policies and other factors. It has been recognized
that job satisfaction can be impacted by economic, social and psychological factors
(Kwak et al., 2010). Previous empirical research examined the antecedents of job
satisfaction from different aspects. Based on an extensive literature review, Seo et al.
(2003) found that most studies focused on the two sets of characteristics and the
determinants of satisfaction. The first set of characteristics was related with
organizational dimensions such as jobs, interpersonal relationship in work and salaries.
The second set of characteristics was associated with individual factors such as gender,
age and educational background of employees. Similar to this idea, Duffy et al. (2006)
stated that satisfaction should be consisted of two parts, namely, work satisfaction and
environment satisfaction. Working satisfaction could be understood as how people feel
about their own jobs, whereas environment satisfaction was about the supervisors,
co-workers and other factors.

2.3 Organizational justice and job satisfaction

Organizational justice had direct influence toward job satisfaction, and many previous
works were interested in examining the specific relationship between organizational justice
and job satisfaction. There are many different subcomponents in both organizational justice
JCHRM and job satisfaction. It was complex to measure all the items, so some scholars chose to
7,2 conduct researches to examine a certain number of selected items to study this topic. Guo
and Wang (2008) discussed the fairness in payment in terms of distributive justice and
procedural justice and showed the relationships clearly between it and salary satisfaction
which is part of job satisfaction. Du et al. (2005) pointed out that distributive justice had
significant correlations with salary satisfaction and promotion satisfaction. Both Duffy and
118 Richard (2006) and Card et al. (2010) agreed that distributive justice would affect people’s
preference toward jobs. Loi et al. (2009) found that different factors of organizational justice
may have multilevel influences toward job satisfaction. Apart from above examples,
McAuliffe et al. (2009), Kwak et al. (2010) and Heponiemi et al. (2011) analyzed the
relationship between subcomponents of justice and job satisfaction. They all found that
procedural justice had positive correlations with all the subcomponents of job satisfaction.
However, distributive and interactive had positive correlations with some subcomponents of
job satisfaction, whereas other subcomponents have negative correlations (Colquitt et al.,
2001). Cedwyn and Awamleh (2006) also carefully examined this topic in detail. They proved
that distributive justice and interactive justice had significant effects on job satisfaction;
however, procedural justice failed to show this kind of connection. Tziner et al. (2011)
interpreted that organizational justice and job satisfaction had a significant positive
relationship. Chen et al. (2010) supported this point of view as well.
Moreover, studies conducted in the Chinese context also showed that organizational
justice had a significant correlation with job satisfaction, which was consistent with the
findings observed in western society. For example, Leung et al. (1999) surveyed the local
employees of joint venture hotels in China, and they found that procedural and
performance-based distributive justice was related to job satisfaction. What is more,
comparison with other local employees was related to job satisfaction, but comparison with
overseas employees was not. Unfortunately, few of the researches had examined the effects
of distributive justice, procedural justice and interactive justice on job satisfaction within the
same studies. In light of this, this study examined the three kinds of organizational justice on
job satisfaction simultaneously among Chinese employees. Hypothesis is proposed as
following:
H1. Distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice have positive
relationships with job satisfaction.
As predicted, organizational justice will have a strong relationship with job satisfaction in
both of the two types of organizations. Zainalipour et al. (2010) further pointed out that these
different categories of organizational justice would affect the employees’ job satisfaction to
some extent. It could be understood easily because different people from different
background would have different perception upon justice in a certain organization (Colquitt
et al., 2005). Different attitudes toward justice might lead to different impacts upon job
satisfaction. Yan et al. (2007) made a research and pointed out that although there was not a
very significant distinction between state owned enterprise (SOEs) and private enterprises
in the aspects of distractive justice and procedural justice, from the averages, SOEs had a
higher justice perception in terms of distractive justice, whereas private enterprises might
tend to emphasis in procedural justice. Yan et al. (2007) also agreed that the different
ownership of enterprises might lead to employees’ different attitudes toward a series of
motivation methods including different categories of organizational justice. From above
analysis, the second hypothesis is as following:
 H2a. Among employees in SOEs, distributive justice, procedural justice, and Organizational
interactional justice have positive relationships with job satisfaction. justice and job
H2b. Among employees in private companies, distributive justice, procedural satisfaction
justice and interactional justice have positive relationships with job
satisfaction.
The next concerning point is whether the different forms of labors will have different 119
attitudes toward different types of organizational justice. Along with the amazing
development of China’s economy, as well as the market economy, some more flexible types
of labors exist including service dispatching workers and casual labors. Service dispatching
workers is also called staff leasing or employee leasing. It means to hire labor from a third
company, and the employers pay part of the welfare fees with all the welfare fees paid by the
third company. Compared with the full-time workers, service dispatching workers and
casual workers have a relatively passive position in the corporation. Thus, it could be
predicted that because of the different types of the workers, their job satisfaction will be
affected by a different type of organizational justice most. It is hypothesized that:
H3a. Among full-time employees, distributive justice, procedural justice and
interactional justice have positive relationships with job satisfaction.
H3b. Among part-time employees, distributive justice, procedural justice and
interactional justice has a positive relationship with job satisfaction.

3. Methods
3.1 Procedure and samples
We collected data on employees from a variety of companies in Hangzhou, Taizhou, Peking,
Dalian and other cities in China. The nature of companies included state-owned enterprises
and private companies. Because of the geographic factors, the questionnaires were delivered
by e-mail to the employees in these corporations. Employees returned the questionnaire
directly to the authors to assure the confidentiality. Questionnaires were distributed to 500
employees, and we got 329 responses with the response rate of 65.8 per cent. After screening
out problematic cases, 296 were retained in the final sample.

3.2 Measures
All measures used in this study were adopted from previous research and originally
constructed in the English language. Because data collection was administered in Chinese,
we followed the commonly used “translation-back translation” procedure (Brislin, 1980) to
create Chinese versions of the adopted scales. These measures are briefly described in the
following sections.
3.2.1 Organizational justice. We measured participant perceptions of procedural justice,
distributive justice and interactional justice with the scale developed and validated by
Colquitt et al. (2001). Extent of agreement was assessed on a scale ranging from 1, “to a very
small extent”, to 5, “to a very large extent”. For procedural justice, participants were told to
“refer to the procedures your immediate supervisor uses to make decisions about pay,
rewards, evaluations, promotions, assignments, etc.” when assessing their agreement with
each of seven items (␣ ⫽ 0.85). These seven items assessed adherence to the rules outlined in
Leventhal (1980) and Thibaut and Walker (1975).
For distributive justice, participants were instructed to “refer to the outcomes you
receive from your job, such as pay, rewards, evaluations, promotions, assignments, etc.”
JCHRM when assessing their agreement with four items (␣ ⫽ 0.93). This four-item scale
7,2 assessed adherence to an equity rule.
For interactional justice, participants were simply asked to refer to “their immediate
supervisor” when assessing agreement with the respective items (␣ ⫽ 0.89). The nine
items measuring interactional justice adherence to the respect and propriety rules
outlined in Bies and Moag (1986), as well as the justification and truthfulness rules
120 outlined in Bies and Moag (1986).
3.2.2 Job satisfaction. Cammann et al.’s (1983) three-item (␣ ⫽ 0.84) scale was used to
measure overall job satisfaction. Items included the following: “All in all, I am satisfied with
my job”; “In general, I don’t like my job (reverse scoring)”; and “In general, I like working
here”. Participants responded on a five-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly
disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

4. Results
4.1 Confirmatory factor analysis
Confirmatory factor analysis was performed on all constructs in the study to
demonstrate construct distinctiveness. A baseline model (four-factor model consisting
of distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice and job satisfaction) was
compared with four alternative models: Model 1 was a three-factor model with
distributive justice and procedural justice merged into a single factor; Model 2 was a
two-factor model with combinations of distributive justice, procedural justice and
interactional justice; Model 3 was a one-factor model with combinations of distributive
justice, procedural justice, interactional justice and job satisfaction. Results are
presented in Table I.
As shown in Table I, the baseline model had a good fit [␹2 (147) ⫽ 344.54, CFI ⫽ 0.96,
TLI ⫽ 0.95, RMSEA ⫽ 0.08]. In addition, results reflected a significantly worse fit for the
three-factor model (o␹2 (152) ⫽ 416.82, p ⬍ 0.01), two-factor model (o␹2 (159) ⫽ 549.30,
p ⬍ 0.01) and one-factor model (o␹2 (160) ⫽ 1,135.73, p ⬍ 0.01). Taken together, fit
indices of the nested models revealed that distributive justice, procedural justice,
interactional justice and job satisfaction were distinct constructs.

4.2 Descriptive analysis

Of 296 employees, 56.45 per cent were males, and their mean age was 43.55 years. In
terms of education, 20.21 per cent had high school diplomas, 30.45 per cent had technical
college or vocational degrees and 49.34 per cent had undergraduate or graduate degrees.
Means, standard deviations and correlations are shown in Table II.

Model Factors ␹2 df o␹2 RMSEA CFI TLI

Baseline Four-factor model 344.54 147 0.08 0.96 0.95

model
Model 1 Three-factor model: combine DJ and PJ 416.82 152 75.48 0.09 0.93 0.91
Model 2 Two-factor model: combine DJ, PJ and IJ 549.30 159 216.76 0.09 0.90 0.89
Table I. Model 3 One-factor model: combine DJ, PJ, IJ and JS 1,135.73 160 795.19 0.16 0.76 0.72
Comparison of
overall measurement Notes: DJ ⫽ distributive justice, PJ ⫽ procedural justice, IJ ⫽ interactional justice, JS ⫽ job
models satisfaction; **p ⬍ 0.01
Correlations between distributive justice (r ⫽ 0.67, p ⬍ 0.01), procedural justice (r ⫽ Organizational
0.73, p ⬍ 0.01), interactional justice (r ⫽ 0.83, p ⬍ 0.01) and job satisfaction were all justice and job
significant.
satisfaction
4.3 Hypotheses testing
We conducted regression analysis to test the H1. Results are presented in Table III. It
revealed that distributive justice (␤ ⫽ 0.26, p ⬍ 0.01), procedural justice (␤ ⫽ 0.23, p ⬍ 121
0.01) and interactional justice (␤ ⫽ 0.42, p ⬍ 0.01) all had positive effects on job
satisfaction.
To further test our H2a, we conducted regression analyses on samples from
state-owned enterprises and private enterprises. Table IV presented the results for
state-owned enterprises. Results showed that distributive justice (␤ ⫽ 0.29, p ⬍ 0.05),
procedural justice (␤ ⫽ 0.32, p ⬍ 0.01) and interactional justice (␤ ⫽ 0.39, p ⬍ 0.01) all
had positive effects on job satisfaction. Table V presented the results for private
enterprises and showed that distributive justice (␤ ⫽ 0.26, p ⬍ 0.01), procedural justice
(␤ ⫽ 0.29, p ⬍ 0.01) and interactional justice (␤ ⫽ 0.42, p ⬍ 0.01) had positive effects on
job satisfaction.
To test our H3, we conducted regression analyses on full-time employees and
part-time employees. Table VI presented the results on full-time employees and showed
that distributive justice (␤ ⫽ 0.19, p ⬍ 0.01), procedural justice (␤ ⫽ 0.23, p ⬍ 0.01) and

Variable M SD 1 2 3 4

1. Distributive justice 4.22 0.56 (0.93)

2. Procedural justice 4.65 0.45 0.75** (0.85)
3. Interactional justice 4.02 0.76 0.70** 0.78** (0.89)
4. Job satisfaction 4.76 0.45 0.67** 0.73** 0.88** (0.84) Table II.
Means, standard
Notes: N ⫽ 296. Internal consistency reliabilities appear in parentheses along the diagonal; ** p ⬍ deviations and
0.01 correlations

Predictor variables Job satisfaction

Control effects
Age 0.09
Gendera 0.07
Education 0.05
Types of enterpriseb 0.05
Types of contractc 0.06
Main effects
Distributive justice 0.26**
Procedural justice 0.23**
Interactional justice 0.42**
R2 0.69
Table III.
Notes: a male ⫽ 0, female ⫽ 1; b
SOE ⫽ 0, private enterprise ⫽1; c full-time contract ⫽ 0, part-time Results of regression
contract ⫽ 1; ** p ⬍ 0.01 analysis
JCHRM Predictor variables Job satisfaction
7,2
Control effects
Age 0.07
Gender 0.08
Education 0.06
122 Type of contract main effects 0.05
Distributive justice 0.29*
Procedural justice 0.32**
Table IV. Interactional justice 0.39**
Results of regression R2 0.76
analysis for state-
owned enterprises Notes: ** p ⬍ 0.01; * p ⬍ 0.05

Predictor variables Job satisfaction

Control effects
Age 0.06
Gender 0.07
Education 0.05
Type of contract 0.04
Main effects
Distributive justice 0.26*
Procedural justice 0.20**
Table V. Interactional justice 0.42**
Results of regression R2 0.64
analysis for private
enterprises Notes: ** p ⬍ 0.01; * p ⬍ 0.05

interactional justice (␤ ⫽ 0.49, p ⬍ 0.01) all had positive effects on job satisfaction.
Table VII presented the results on part-time employees and revealed that only
distributive justice (␤ ⫽ 0.59, p ⬍ 0.01) had positive effects on job satisfaction.

5. Discussion
The findings of this study indicated that distributive justice, procedural justice and
interactional justice were positively related to job satisfaction. Moreover, the same
findings were also observed among employees from SOEs and private companies
separately. Finally, results showed that among full-time employees, the three kinds of
justice had positive relationships with job satisfaction, whereas only distributive justice
was related to job satisfaction for part-time employees. Theoretical and practical
implications are discussed as following.
First, our findings confirmed the relationships between organizational justice
and job satisfaction within Chinese context, which addressed the generalizability of
their connections across different cultures. These three types of justice were found
to relate to job satisfaction in a number of studies in the USA (McFarlin and
Sweeney, 1992; Moorman, 1991). Meanwhile, Leung et al. (1999) found that
employees who worked with overseas Chinese and Japanese expatriates were less
Predictor variables Job satisfaction
Organizational
justice and job
Control effects satisfaction
Age 0.09
Gender 0.08
Education 0.06
Type of enterprises 0.03
123
Main effects
Distributive justice 0.19**
Procedural justice 0.23**
Interactional justice 0.49** Table VI.
R2 0.71 Results of regression
analysis for full-time
Note: ** p ⬍ 0.01 employees

Predictor variables Job satisfaction

Control effects
Age 0.04
Gender 0.03
Education 0.05
Type of enterprises 0.02
Main effects
Distributive justice 0.59**
Procedural justice 0.26
Interactional justice 0.05 Table VII.
R2 0.61 Results of regression
analysis for part-time
Note: ** p ⬍ 0.01 employees

satisfied than those who worked with expatriates from the West, and they thought
this difference was explainable in terms of differences in perceived distributive
justice.
Second, our findings on the distributive justice, procedural justice and
interactional justice have implications for future research on organizational justice
in the context of China. China is considered as a collectivist culture, which is
characterized by placing an emphasis on the interpersonal relationships (i.e.
guanxi). Drawing on this idea, researchers have argued that distributive justice,
characterized as a rational evaluation of ones’ outcomes, may play a less important
role in affecting employee job satisfaction than do procedural justice and
interactional justice in the Chinese organizational context (Yang and Zhang, 2012).
However, our findings suggested that distributive justice had a positive relationship
with job satisfaction even using subsamples of full-time and part-time employees.
There is thus value in testing the effect of distributive justice on other work
attitudes and behaviors even in a collectivist cultural context.
Third, although distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice are
related to job satisfaction, they differ in terms of strength between different natures of
JCHRM companies. Specifically speaking, in SOEs, employees’ perception about procedural
7,2 justice is higher than distributive justice. While in private enterprises, the procedural
justice and interactive justice are tested to have similar coefficients. These distinctions
are resulted from the different characters of SOEs and private enterprises. SOEs reward
system is less market-oriented, and the payment system is often controlled by
government (Chen et al., 2005). In other word, the returns for employees are not totally
124 depending on their efforts. Meanwhile, in private enterprises, one’s salary connects with
his inputs to a larger extent, so he needs to work hard so as to get higher salary. What is
more, Chinese companies are stated to adopt greater hierarchy than western countries
both in social activities and in the business field (Wang et al., 2003). This trend is more
obvious in state-owned enterprise in China. As a consequence, managers in SOEs has
less flexibility in managing process, and employees have less opportunity to take part in
the process of making decisions. Private enterprises are doing better in this aspect than
SOEs. Thus, people in SOEs concern more about procedural justice than distributive
justice. Once the procedure is more fair, they could get the more reasonable returns
based on their contributions to the companies.
Finally, the relationship between organizational justice and job satisfaction differ
between full-time employees and part-time employees. For full-time employees, the
interactive justice is proved to be the most significant factor in affecting people’s job
satisfaction. The reasons for it are in the discussion in former part. However, for
part-time employees, distributive justice is proved to be the most significant factor,
whereas procedural justice and the interactive justice are proved to have no
significant relationship with job satisfaction (Table VII). This result is quite
different from above analyses. The reasons should be related with this type of
employees’ position in companies. Different from full-time employees, part-time
employees would have a relatively short period of labor contracts. They could not
enjoy the same benefits or bonus as full-time workers do. They have higher liquidity
so that they feel a higher risk to pay for their living fees. Additionally, those
part-time employees often in non-critical position in companies, and they have fewer
chance to connect with higher level of managers, let alone influencing the process of
making decision (Zhou, 2006).
Knowledge of how distributive justice, procedural justice and interactive justice
affect people’s job satisfaction could help managers take more appropriate
managerial methods to boost employees’ willingness to work. To be more specific,
from the interpretation about the effects of distributive justice, managers should
improve their distributive system because an effective performance evaluation
system would be helpful in motivating people. In terms of procedural justice, it is of
great importance in Chinese corporations. Since the opening-up policy, people have
become more appreciative western style of management, and they want to be treated
fairly under a fair managerial system. More entrepreneurs were making efforts in
this aspect (Zhang and Mao, 2010). It will help, to some extent, to reduce the
influence of Guanxi in Chinese context. Interactive justice, as mentioned to be so
important in China, should also be thought highly. Managers should take efforts in
building a good relationship with employees. When western corporations wanted to
set up a branch company or build a joint venture, they should also treasure
interactive relationship.
 To be more detailed, for different types of companies, state-owned enterprises should Organizational
adopt more democratic style to manage their employees. Because they are concerned justice and job
more about the interactive justice, managers should pay more attention to improve the
relationship with employees. They should also make efforts to form a strict and fair
satisfaction
system of management so that all the process of evaluations is made under a unique
standard. For private enterprises, interpersonal relationship is still one of the focuses of
managers’ daily management. This is the requirement of Chinese culture. Second, 125
different people may also prefer different returns, including physical ones and
psychological ones. Consequently, the focus of their treatment should differ based on
their certain needs. For full-time employees, they often have a comparatively stable
treatment from the company. They concern more about their psychological needs. As a
result, interactive justice should be the key point in motivating this group of people. For
non-full-time workers, they work a relatively short time and they are easily to leave to
another company. They pay most of their attention to their physical returns. Ordinarily,
they do not plan to work in one company for life-long time. To maximize their efforts to
contribute as much as possible to the company, managers should give their suitable
incentive pay to motivate them. This could also maximize the function the motivation
for this group of people.

5.1 Limitation and suggestion for future research

Because of objective and some subjective limitations in conducting the research,
there are some points needing further improvement. First, although the writer
selects relatively big amount of samples, some of them are not valid. In addition, in
some companies, there are only a small group of respondents, whereas in other
companies, the amount is much larger. This may bring some deviation in the final
results. Second, people’s different understandings about questions in questionnaire
will influence the accuracy of the research. Third, in the process of factor analysis,
there are some overlapped items in each component. When considering about the
source of the questionnaire, which is designed for foreign companies, there may be
some inconsistency in Chinese setting. Finally, there will be other factors in analysis
the connection between organizational justice perception and job satisfaction, which
is not included in this paper.
For future direction of research, the initial thing is to develop a questionnaire for
Chinese context, so that the research will be more targeting. This is also a complex
and tough process needing a mass of experiments and studies. There are also some
other factors, such as trust, that play an important role in influencing job
satisfaction and other mediating models that react between organizational justice
and job satisfaction. These may also be of further interest in research.

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JCHRM Brislin, R.W. (1980), “Translation and content analysis of oral and written material”, Handbook of
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Further reading
Hu, Z.G. and Zhang, P. (2007), “The function of organizational justice in the field of performance
management”, Enterprise Vitality, Vol. 7, pp. 80-81.
JCHRM About the authors
Yunhong Hao is a Full Professor of School of Administration at Zhejiang Gongshang University,
7,2 China. He received his PhD degree in Administration from Xibei University. His research interests
include corporate governance and strategic management.
Jie Hao is a Lecturer in the School of Accounting at Zhejiang Gongshang University, China. She
received her MA degree from the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Her research interests
include strategic human resource management, organizational justice and decision-making. Jie
128 Hao is the corresponding author and can be contacted at: flyingjojo@qq.com
Xiaochen Wang is an Associate Professor of School of Administration at Zhejiang Gongshang
University, China. He received his PhD in Psychology from East China Normal University. His
research interests include organizational behavior, moral decision-making and organizational
ethics.

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