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“The first virtue of social institutions is justice, as truth is of systems of thought” (Rawls, 2009, p.3). Justice is basic structure of society- a social construct and an instrument through which social institutes practice and exercise laws, regulate fundamental rights and duties and anticipate the allocation of benefits from social cooperation. Generally speaking, in past justice was studied through the lenses of social paradigm (social justice), but in recent years the term justice has been described and explored in the context of organization (Colak & Erdost, 2004) as means of achieving effective organizational functioning, better quality performance and satisfaction of its employees.
The term organizational justice was coined by Greenberg (1987), who defined it as perception of fairness of organizational events, practices, processes and decisions and subsequently it has become one of the important organizational variable (Greenberg, 1990). It is usually believed that organizational justice is a recent concept in organizational settings, regarding which research started in 1960s with Adam’s equity theory.
It is to be noted that, researchers have also mentioned that perception of justice is culturally relative phenomenon and shaped by specific socialization and societal norms, with Americans preferring the principle of equity, Indians preferring principle of need and Dutch preferring equality (Murphy- Berman et al. 1984; Susanna, 2006; Storey, 2000).
While assessment of justice in any organization, the context has to be retained, this is where proper assessment of organizational justice in institutions like universities gathers scope. Pertinently the perception of justice at workplace significantly determines a range of work related attitudes, cognitive, emotional and behavioural responses/ outcomes among employees. Folger and Cropanzano (1998) argued that perception of fairness leads to both positive and negative reactions which in turn results into positive and negative outcomes. This is very essential for the smooth functioning of the universities as well where in the teaching faculty may not significantly contribute to the effectiveness of the institute in case of any discrimination in delivery of the justice. Many research studies support the same, e.g. Demirel and Seckin (2011) found that all the three dimensions of organizational justice–distributive, procedural and interactional justice are positively related with intent to share knowledge, intent to explicit knowledge, motivation to share knowledge and other aspects of knowledge sharing.