Impact of Organisational Justice on Organisational Citizenship Behaviour: The Mediating Role of Organisational Commitment among Employees of Private Universities in NCR

Abstract

This study examines how perceptions of organisational justice shape organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) among employees of private universities in the National Capital Region (NCR), and whether organisational commitment carries that effect. The analytical concern is not whether fair treatment matters, which is well established, but how it works: whether employees who feel fairly treated go beyond their formal duties because they have become committed to the institution, or for reasons independent of commitment. The study adopts an exploratory, secondary-evidence and meta-analytic path design. Evidence is drawn from published meta-analyses of organisational justice, commitment and citizenship behaviour, from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) and University Grants Commission records on the growth of private universities, and from the theoretical literature on social exchange. Pooled correlations reported by Colquitt et al. (2001), Meyer et al. (2002) and Ng and Feldman (2011) are combined to estimate a three-variable mediation model for procedural, distributive and informational justice. The results show that procedural and distributive justice relate more strongly to commitment (corrected r = .57 and .51) than to citizenship behaviour directed at the organisation (.27 and .25). Organisational commitment transmits between 24% and 53% of the effect of procedural and distributive justice on OCB, depending on the commitment–OCB estimate used, and between 15% and 25% of the effect of informational justice. Mediation is therefore partial: a direct justice–OCB path remains in every scenario. For private universities in the NCR, where employment is largely contractual and governance is management-driven, the analysis suggests that fair procedures build citizenship mainly through commitment, while respectful and transparent communication by supervisors acts on citizenship more directly. The paper sets out a measurement and sampling protocol for a primary survey that would test these propositions in the NCR.