Procedural Justice scale

Description

This measure, developed by Mcfarlin and Sweeney (1992), uses similar items and response format to the Distributive Justice Index to describe employee perceptions of procedural justice. Procedural justice is an assesment of the fairness of the means or process used to determine employee rewards. The measure asks employees about the fairness of procedures used to communicate performance feedback, determine pay raises, evaluate per­formance, and determine who is promoted. Aquino, Lewis, and Bradfield (1999) added two items asking about the fairness of procedures used toter­ minate or discipline employees and the fairness of procedures used to ex­ press grievances.

Reliability

Coefficient alpha values ranged from .73 to .85 (Aquino, Lewis, & Bradfield, 1999; McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992; Sweeney & McFarlin, 1993).

Validity

Perceptions of procedural justice were negatively correlated with deviant behaviors against other employees and were positively correlated with dis­tributive justice, interactive justice, age, pay level satisfaction, job satis­ faction, subordinate’s evaluation of his or her supervisor, organizational commitment, and distributive justice (Aquino, Lewis, & Bradfield, 1999; McFarlin & Sweeney, 1992; Sweeney & Mcfarlin, 1993). Structural models evaluated by Sweeney and McFarlin (1993) showed that distributive justice best predicts job satisfaction, whereas procedural justice best predicts orga­nizational commitment. Aquino, Lewis, and Bradfield (1999) used confir­matory factor analysis to find that procedural justice was one dimensional and was empirically distinct from distributive justice.

Source

Sweeney, P. D., & McFarlin, D. B. (1993). Workers’ evaluations of the “ends” and the “means”: An examination of four models of distributive and procedural justice. Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, 55 ( 1), 23-40. Copyright© 1993 by Academic Press. Items were taken from text, p. 27. Reproduced with permission.

Items

Responses are obtained on a 5-point Likert-type scale where 1 = very unfair and 5 = very fair.

1. How fair or unfair are the procedures used to communicate performance feedback?
2. How fair or unfair are the procedures used to determine pay raises?
3. How fair or unfair are the procedures used to evaluate performance.
4. How fair or unfair are the procedures used to determine promotions?