Unfair rewards, poorly performing organizations and perceptions of deservingness as explanations of diminished job performance
Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance
ISSN: 2051-6614
Article publication date: 11 April 2023
Issue publication date: 8 November 2023
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to detail how employees’ experience of distributive injustice may compromise their job performance, with specific attention to how this detrimental process may be explained in part by their beliefs about organization-level underperformance and moderated by their own psychological entitlement.
Design/methodology/approach
The research hypotheses were tested with three-round, time-lagged data collected among employees and their supervisors.
Findings
A critical channel through which employees’ perceptions that their organization’s reward system is unfair translates into thwarted job performance is a conviction that their organization does not meet its own performance targets. As a mediator, such organizational underperformance beliefs have particularly salient effects on employees who believe they are more deserving than others.
Practical implications
This study gives HR managers insights into how they can reduce the danger that unfair reward practices escalate into a reduced propensity by employees to complete their job tasks diligently. HR managers should make employees aware of their possible entitlement and discourage them from expecting that things always must go their way.
Originality/value
This research unpacks the connection between distributive injustice and job performance, by delineating the unique roles of two pertinent factors (organizational underperformance beliefs and psychological entitlement) in this connection.
Keywords
Citation
De Clercq, D., Haq, I.U. and Azeem, M.U. (2023), "Unfair rewards, poorly performing organizations and perceptions of deservingness as explanations of diminished job performance", Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, Vol. 10 No. 4, pp. 624-643. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-11-2022-0315
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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