Abstract

Organizational commitment has long been an outcome of interest in justice theory and research. Much of the early research was guided by two conceptual paradigms: the differential effects paradigm, in which researchers examined the relative contributions of employees’ perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice to commitment; and the interaction effects paradigm, in which researchers examined the joint effects of the different justice perceptions. Although these approaches continue to guide contemporary research on justice and commitment, investigators have also developed new conceptual paradigms. In this chapter, the authors review three such paradigms in the contemporary literature _ entity justice, multi-foci justice, justice climate _ and summarize their novel contributions to the understanding of the connection between justice and employee commitment. The authors also discuss the mechanisms by which justice has been theorized to promote commitment. Finally, they consider practical implications of the contemporary research.