Organizational justice and work engagement: the mediating effect of self-leadership

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of organizational justice on work engagement and the mediating effect of employees’ self-leadership on this relationship within the Korean organizational context.

Design/methodology/approach

Cross-sectional, self-report data on organizational justice, work engagement, and self-leadership were obtained from 237 employees in Korea. Structural equation modeling was mainly used for data analyses.

Findings

The results revealed the direct significant effect of organizational justice on both self-leadership and work engagement. Also, self-leadership was found to have a significant effect on work engagement as well as a partial mediating effect on the relationship between organizational justice and employees’ work engagement.

Research limitations/implications

The social relations and personal behavioral components were conjointly analyzed to measure organizational justice. Harman’s single factor test and unmeasured latent variable tests were performed to minimize the chance of the common method variance (CMV) issue, additional suggestion was provided to prevent CMV issue for future research.

Practical implications

These results could be used for designing an organizational system and structure based on the interactive relations between social structure and behaviors to improve organizational performance.

Originality/value

The research, which has conceptualized the interactions between social relations and individual behaviors to measure the organizational justice level, is rare.

Citation

Park, Y., Song, J.H. and Lim, D.H. (2016), "Organizational justice and work engagement: the mediating effect of self-leadership", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 37 No. 6, pp. 711-729. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-09-2014-0192