Organisational justice and employee perceptions on hospital management

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose to clarify what kind of managerial challenges employees experience regarding organisational justice in hospitals.

Design/methodology/approach

This exploratory study of 8,971 employees working in 14 hospitals and examines the concept of organisational justice in management with qualitative and quantitative methods.

Findings

An inductive content analysis of the comments revealed five integrative frames describing challenges in hospital management at respondents' workplaces. These frames should be regarded as major managerial challenges in hospitals. These findings illustrate important antecedents of organisational justice and suggest that work units tend to share the same perceptions of justice. They also reveal that individually produced comments reflect collective experiences in organisational justice. Further, the results indicate that problems in management and policies are often experienced in a complex way, and people making justice judgements do not separate procedural and interactional factors.

Research limitations/implications

Although the commentators producing qualitative data represented many organisational hierarchy levels, the results should not be generalised to apply to horizontal, informal social relationships.

Practical implications

This paper gives useful information regarding challenges in human resources management in hospitals.

Originality/value

The paper suggests that people making fairness judgements do not make a distinction between procedural and interpersonal factors. Instead, they use any information available to judge the righteousness of the management events. This paper serves to guide hospital managers towards a better understanding of the importance of organisational justice and its collective nature.

Citation

Wiili‐Peltola, E., Kivimäki, M., Elovainio, M. and Virtanen, M. (2007), "Organisational justice and employee perceptions on hospital management", Journal of Health Organization and Management, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 320-332. https://doi.org/10.1108/14777260710751771