The organizational justice effect among criminal justice employees: A meta‐analysis*

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Organizational justice has been shown to be an important predictor of criminal justice employees’ work‐related perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors. In this study, we take stock of the organizational justice effect on criminal justice employees’ work outcomes by subjecting the literature to a meta‐analysis. Multilevel modeling based on 1,924 effect size estimates drawn from 143 studies (95 independent data sets) was used to establish the empirical status of the organizational justice effect. The results indicate a sizeable relationship between organizational justice and justice system employee work outcomes (Mz = .256, CI = [.230, .283]). The findings also demonstrate that the organizational justice effect size varies slightly across several methodological variations. Specifically, the organizational justice effect size is larger when the concept is measured with scales that contain survey items tapping into all four dimensions of justice. Also, we found that outcome type, presence of confounding mechanisms, research design, and sample characteristics moderate the justice effect. We conclude that organizational justice theory is a useful framework for developing a more theoretically informed understanding of justice system employees’ work outcomes. We discuss the theoretical implications of the meta‐analytic findings and avenues for future research based on the results.