Linking justice and employee performance in public organizations

Fairness is considered a core value of public administration and public personnel management. But it is worth asking: is fairness good for performance? Organizational justice scholars, mainly in psychology, suggest the answer is yes, but they present two different explanations for the justice-performance connection. First, the social exchange approach argues that concepts like leader-member exchange, affect, and trust mediate the relationship between justice perceptions and employee performance. Second, the relational approach suggests fair treatment heightens identification with work groups, which inspires cooperation. The goal of this chapter is to discuss the two dominant theoretical mechanisms used to describe how organizational justice enhances performance, review the evidence supporting each, and propose fruitful avenues for future research. Altogether this body of empirical research documents that we can have both high fairness and good performance.