Informational Justice and Remote Working: All is Not Fair for Work at Home.

Abstract

Given the increase in remote working due to the social distancing requirements as part of the response to the Covid-19 Pandemic, the variable of work-from-home has become more salient in the business community. The existing literature squarely places remote working as an antecedent to employee perceptions of Organizational Justice throughout many industries. The same literature presents work from home in a positive frame of reference in a pre-pandemic world. However, in the Covid-19 environment, many perceptions have changed regarding employment. Likely overall perceptions regarding work from home have also shifted because more people engage in the activity. We argue that perceptions of work from home through the frame of reference found in the literature of Organizational Justice have shifted to be more negative. To study this phenomenon, we gathered social media data in comments from a work discussion forum on the Reddit website. We coded the data with an a priori codeset and assigned dummy variables for analysis. The dataset was analyzed via a five-way Factorial ANOVA examining the influences of the four independent variables of Organizational Justice (Distributive, Procedural, Interpersonal, and Informational Justice) and the temporal occurrence of Covid-19 on the sentimental polarity of comments surrounding the topic of work from home. Our findings indicated that Informational Justice significantly contributes to more negative sentiment regarding work-from-home. Additionally, when Distributive, Interpersonal, and Informational Justice and Distributive and Informational Justice interact, sentimental polarity grows more negative for work from home. Discussion of results, implications for practice, and limitations presented.