The role of organisational justice, burnout and commitment in the understanding of absenteeism in the Canadian healthcare sector

The purpose of this paper is to integrate Greenberg's perspective on the connection between injustice and stress in order to clarify the role of organisational justice, burnout and organisational commitment in the understanding of absenteeism.

The study was carried out among 457 workers of a large healthcare establishment in the Canadian public healthcare sector. The model was tested using structural equation methods.

The results reveal that procedural and interactional justices have an indirect effect on exhaustion through distributive injustice. Moreover, it was found that distributive injustice is indirectly linked to short‐term absences through exhaustion. By contrast, the relationship between distributive injustice and long‐term absence can be explained by two mediating variables, namely, exhaustion and psychosomatic complaints.

In spite of the non‐longitudinal nature of this study, the results suggest that the stress model and the medical model best explain the relationship between organisational injustice and absenteeism, while the withdrawal model via organisational commitment is not associated in this study with absenteeism.

Healthcare managers should consider the possibility of better involving employees in the decision‐making process in order to increase their perception of procedural and interactional justice, and indirectly reduce exhaustion and absenteeism through a greater perception of distributive justice.

For the healthcare sector, the need to reduce absenteeism is particularly urgent because of budget restrictions and the shortage of labour around the world.

This is one of the first studies to provide a complete model that analyses the stress process in terms of how organisational justice affects short‐ and long‐term absences, in a bid to understand the specific process and factors that lead to shorter and longer episodes of absence.