A Study on the Relationships among Organizational Justice, Organizational Identification, and Work Engagement: The Evidence from the Hi-Tech Service Industries

Work engagement refers to a positive, fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption. Based on group engagement model, we build a relationship model of organziational justice, organizational identification, and work engagement. The results reveal that organizational identification partially mediated the relationship between distributive justice, interactive justice and work engagement, but did not mediate the relationship between procedure justice and work engagement. It is concluded with a discussion of research findings and implications for both marketing theory and practice.

1. INTRODUCTION

In recent years, work engagement has become a well-known construct to both scientists and practitioners. Research by Gallup and others shows that engaged employees are more productive, more profitable, more customer-focused, safer, and more likely to withstand temptations to leave (Bates, 2004; Baumruk, 2004; Harter et al., 2002; Richman, 2006). However, recent research in China and other countries shows that there are more disengaged employees than engaged employees in today's organisations. Actively disengaged employees erode an organization's bottom line through breaking the spirits of colleagues in the process. Within the U.S. workforce, Gallup estimates this cost to be more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone (Bates, 2004; Johnson, 2004; Kowalski, 2003). Because there are more disengaged employees in China, this cost would be considerably more than$300 billion. As a result, it is a pivotal objective for service managers, who wish to increase their productivity and profitability to improve work engagement.