Role Justice scale

Description

This measure, (Role Justice scale) developed by Zohar (1995), describes employee perceptions of role justice. Role justice perceptions represent an employee’s appraisal of fairness when a role sender’s (e.g., supervisor, client) expectations are not met by the employee due to limiting conditions associated with a job. Per­ceptions of injustice or unfair reactions may be a source of role stress. Alter­nately, perceptions of justice may moderate the effects of role conflict and overload. That is, role senders who react fairly when an employee is unable to meet all role demands may help reduce the effects of overload. And role senders who react unfairly may increase the salience and discomfort em­ployees feel when overloaded.

Reliability 

The measure had a coefficient alpha of .87 (Zohar, 1995).

Validity

In Zohar (1995), the construct correlated negatively with role conflict and ambiguity and positively with social support.

Source

Items

Employees are asked to think about their current situation at work and indi­ cate how fairly their significant role senders would respond in four different scenarios. Responses are obtained  using a 9-point Likert-type scale where 9 = the affected individual would respond very fairly and 1 = the affected individual would respond very unfairly.

The scenarios are as follows:

1. One of your role senders is negatively affected because you were not informed of your responsibilities, or you were not told what exactly was expected of you.
2. One of your role senders is negatively affected because you had to satisfy contradictory requests, or to work with guidelines which were incompatible with one another.
3. One of your role senders is negatively affected because your job required you to work too fast, or to complete an assignment without the needed time to do it properly.
4. One of your role senders is negatively affected because you did not have the freedom to decide how to organize your work, or the authority to control what was happening.