Are the Scales Tipped in Favor of Procedural or Distributive Justice? An Investigation of the U.S., India, Germany, and Hong Kong (China)

This study explores the role of procedural and distributive justice in influencing supervisory trust, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment. Past work in U.S. settings has shown the differential effects of procedural and distributive justice on job attitudes while other work supports the relationship between both procedural and distributive justice with trust. This study attempts to replicate the US findings and extend them to samples from India, Germany, and China (Hong Kong). A theoretical model was tested via structural equation analysis. Organizational justice was found to be an important predictor of trust in all the samples, indicating the importance of these concepts in organizational life in different cultures. The implications of these results for future research are discussed.