Exploring Perceived Organisational Justice in the Healthcare Sector: Insights From an Arab Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Despite the extensive literature examining the relationship between organisational justice and intention to leave, few attempts have been made to elucidate the dynamics of this relationship, especially in relation to the significant role that pay satisfaction can play within the context of Arab culture. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between perceived organisational justice dimensions (procedural, distributive and interactional) and intention to leave among healthcare workers in Jordan, with a focus on the mediating role of pay satisfaction. The study population includes all physicians and nurses in Jordan’s public and private health services, with a total of 74,351 individuals, as per the Jordanian Physicians’ and Nurses’ Syndicates website. The study employed a quantitative cross-sectional research design with a snowball sampling technique, where potential respondents were personally contacted and asked to send the survey to their colleagues through WhatsApp. We received a total of 679 questionnaires, of which only 545 were valid for analysis. We analysed the data with SmartPLS 4.0 using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). Our results revealed that interactional justice directly influences intention to leave, while distributive and procedural justices do not. Pay satisfaction is significantly influenced by all three dimensions of organisational justice, acting as a full mediator between distributive and procedural justice and intention to leave, but not interactional justice. The study highlights the importance of fair interpersonal relationships and equitable pay practices in reducing intention to leave within Jordanian healthcare organisations. It also emphasises the need for culturally tailored management strategies to improve organisational stability and employee retention. Our research offers novel insights into how cultural context shapes organisational behaviour in the healthcare sector. Accordingly, Arab cultural environments differ from other cultural contexts in how they perceive justice and, consequently, how it relates to intention to leave and pay satisfaction. The findings confirmed that distributive and procedural justices are the same concept within this culture (labelled structural justice), whereas interactional justice, which includes interpersonal and informational justice (as operationally defined in the literature), is a distinct concept (labelled relational justice). Thus, this study contributes to the debate in the current literature on the extent to which the dimensions of organisational justice are related and whether they are distinct from each other (Colquitt et al. 2001).