Organisational justice’s relationship with job satisfaction and organisational commitment among Indian police

Abstract

The concept of justice plays an important role in shaping the attitudes of citizens towards criminal justice agencies. Additionally, research indicates that police officers’ perceptions of justice within their own organisation can affect their attitudes towards it. Most of the research to date has focused on police officers in Western nations; however, the effects of organisational justice could be universal (i.e. cut across different police agencies and nations) or contextual (i.e. vary between cultures). The current study examined the association between perceptions of two dimensions of organisational justice, distributive (fairness in outcomes) and procedural (fairness in procedures/processes), with job satisfaction and organisational commitment among Indian police officers. Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis of survey data collected from 827 officers stationed in the Sonepat and Rohtak districts in the north Indian state of Haryana indicated that perceptions of distributive justice and procedural justice (in terms of promotions and evaluations) had significant positive relationships with both job satisfaction and affective organisational commitment. The findings support the contention that perceptions of organisational justice have important effects on Indian police officers.