Explaining the justice–performance relationship: Trust as exchange deepener or trust as uncertainty reducer?

TLDR

Prior studies link organizational justice to job performance, with trust proposed as a mediator, yet trust has been conceptualized either as a depth indicator of exchange or as a reflection of work-related uncertainty, and the relative importance of affect- versus cognition-based trust remains unclear. This study aims to examine how procedural, interpersonal, and distributive justice influence affect- and cognition-based trust, and how these trust forms mediate justice effects via exchange and uncertainty mechanisms. The authors constructed a mediation model linking justice dimensions to trust forms and subsequently to performance, and tested it using data from a hospital system field study. The field study confirmed that affect-based trust mediates justice-performance relationships through exchange mechanisms, while cognition-based trust mediates them via uncertainty mechanisms.

Abstract

Past research has revealed significant relationships between organizational justice dimensions and job performance, and trust is thought to be one mediator of those relationships. However, trust has been positioned in justice theorizing in 2 different ways, either as an indicator of the depth of an exchange relationship or as a variable that reflects levels of work-related uncertainty. Moreover, trust scholars distinguish between multiple forms of trust, including affect- and cognition-based trust, and it remains unclear which form is most relevant to justice effects. To explore these issues, we built and tested a more comprehensive model of trust mediation in which procedural, interpersonal, and distributive justice predicted affect- and cognition-based trust, with those trust forms predicting both exchange- and uncertainty-based mechanisms. The results of a field study in a hospital system revealed that the trust variables did indeed mediate the relationships between the organizational justice dimensions and job performance, with affect-based trust driving exchange-based mediation and cognition-based trust driving uncertainty-based mediation.