Organizational Justice and its Impact on Job Satisfaction in Public Sector Universities of Afghanistan

The purpose of the present research is to examine the impact of organizational justice on university lecturers’ job satisfaction. Total 240 faculty members were selected as a sample from the four public universities (one from each zone) of Afghanistan. Job satisfaction Scale and Organizational Justice Scale were used for data collection purposes. The result of the study indicated that majority of the respondents were satisfied from their respective jobs. Additionally, the findings of the study reveal that the three facets of organizational justice (distributive justice, interactive justice and informational justice) were the best predictors of employees’ job satisfaction whereas the fourth facet procedural justice being insignificant is turned down. Overall, the regression model explained 29.3% variation in job satisfaction of university employees.


Introduction
In today's competitive environment, job satisfaction is considered as the most vital component as it is related to various workplace and psychological issues. Job Satisfaction is the degree to which an employee likes his job (Spector, 1985). Job Satisfaction is the employee's psychological and physical well-being which is related to employee absenteeism, productivity and employee turnover (Mayer, 2012). Job Satisfaction is the employees' positive or negative attitude towards their jobs (Greenberg & Baron, 2008).
An Organization can be defined as a structured system where people work together to achieve certain goals. An organization needs effective people to achieve those common goals. For this purpose, organizations are now focusing on human resource as it plays a vital role in the organizational success (Akram et al. 2017). Employees in any organization have perceptions of organizational justice as people in the society perceive justice from the government of the country. Distributive Justice, procedural justice, interactive justice, and informational justice are the four facets of organizational justice.
The concern of the first facet of organizational justice namely distributive justice is the fair distribution of resources such as pays, promotions, recognitions, rewards and performance appraisals (Greenberg, 1990). The concern of the second facet procedural justice is the procedure used to allocate resources such as decision-making processes (Colquitt & Greenberg, 2005). The perception of procedural justice was developed on the basis of Thibaut and Walker (1975) theory of procedural justice and considered to be vital for employees; practice and research (Cropanzano et al., 2001). Interactive Justice, the third facet is introduced by Bies and Moag (1986) concerned with the employees' treatment by decision-makers such as the kind of relation between manager and employees (Colquitt & Greenberg, 2005). Bies and Moag (1986) argued that interactive justice can be treated as a separate aspect of organizational justice as the concept of interaction is totally changed from the structure of the procedure (Thorn, 2010). The concern of the last and fourth facet informational justice is truthfulness of information which is provided by the employers to their employees (Greenberg, 1990).
Various studies examined and established a significant relationship between organizational justice and employees' job satisfaction in western countries (Nojani, Arjmandnia, Afrooz, & Rajabi, 2012). Bakhshi et al. (2009) argued that distributive justice was a vital predictor of employees' job satisfaction whereas Masterson et al. (2000) stated that procedural justice was stronger than interactional justice as a predictor of employees' job satisfaction. Zainalipour et al. (2010) found a positive and significant relationship between organizational justice and job satisfaction. In today's world, organizations are facing critical issues such as employee satisfaction, commitment, and retention (Suifan, 2019).
Although researchers and scholars paid high attention to organizational justice and its impact on employees' job satisfaction in western countries but in other countries especially in South Asia region like Afghanistan where there have been very few studies found on the influence of organizational justice on employees' job satisfaction. There is a need to go beyond the western countries for developing a general theory of organizational justice (Leung & Stephan, 2001). Hence, this study is carried out to determine the impact of organizational justice on the job satisfaction of university employees in the changing conditions of Afghanistan. Additionally, the contribution of the four facets of organizational justice i.e. distributive justice, procedural justice, interactive justice, and informational justice will be analyzed towards employees' job satisfaction at the university level. The following conceptual framework will guide this study.

Research Questions
The following research questions were formulated for the purpose of the present study.
I. Are the lecturers working at Afghan Universities satisfied with their jobs? II. What is the impact of the four facets of organizational justice on lecturers' job satisfaction?

Research Methodology 3.1. Research Population and Sample
Afghanistan has 34 provinces and all provinces are divided into four zones i.e. North, South, East, and West zone. The total number of public sector universities in Afghanistan is 38 having approximately 6053 faculty members. Thus, the population of the present study is comprised of all the faculty members of public universities in Afghanistan. For sampling purposes, four universities, one from each zone was selected for the study at hand i.e. Balkh University from North, Paktia University from South, Kandahar University from West and Nangarhar University from East. A total of 60 faculty members were selected from each university, thus comprising 240 respondents as a sample through a purposive sampling technique.

Research Tools
Two types of scales were used for the purpose of data collection. The first scale Job satisfaction (Aghoet al. 1993;Aryee, Fields & Luk, 1999) was adopted which has six statements for collecting data on employees' job satisfaction based on 5 options of Likert Scale from 1 strongly disagree to 5 strongly agree. The second scale Organizational Justice (Niehoff and Moorman, 1993) was adopted which has four facets of organizational justice namely distributive justice having five (5) statements, procedural justice having six (6) statements, interactive justice having nine (9) statements based on 7 options of Likert scale and informational justice having five (5) statements with 5 options.

Data Analysis
After data collection, the data was entered into the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24. The data was analyzed using reliability analysis, one-sample t-test and multiple regressions.

Data Analysis Results
The first step of data analysis is carrying out reliability analysis. The result of reliability analysis is given as under: .908 9 Informational Justice (InJ) .831 5 The result of reliability analysis shows that the Cronbach's alpha value for Job Satisfaction (JS) is .721 which is inacceptable range, Distributive Justice .822, Procedural Justice .881 and Informational Justice (InJ) .831 are in good ranges and Interactive Justice (IJ) .908 is in excellent range, suggesting that the data can be used for further analysis.

Assessing Job Satisfaction among University Employees
For answering the first research question i.e. Are the lecturers working at Afghani universities satisfied with their jobs? One Sample t-Test is carried out with the result as under: The result of One Sample Statistics indicates that the total number of respondents is 240. The mean of Job Satisfaction is 4.0639 and standard deviation is .61844. The result of One Sample t-Test indicates that the mean difference of Job Satisfaction from test value 3 is 1.06389 which is statistically highly significant at p< .01, suggesting that majority of the respondents are satisfied with their jobs.

Assessing the Impact of Organizational Justice on Job Satisfaction
For answering the second research question i.e. what is the contribution of the four facets of organizational justice on lecturers' job satisfaction? Multiple regressions are carried out which gives the following results: The result of table 4 indicates the summary of regression model. The value of coefficient R is (r=.541), the value of R 2 is .293, the value of adjusted R 2 is .281 and the value of standard error of estimate is .54579.  The result of Table 6 indicates relationship and contribution of independent variables towards dependent variable. The results of all the three tables of regression analysis above are reported below in regular econometric format for better understanding of the results. N= 240 As a whole the regression model is statistically significant at F = 24.330 at P < .01. In the model, the included four independent variables show 29.3% variation in dependent variable. By looking at individual variables, distributive justice is statistically significant at p < .05, interactive justice at p < .01 and informational justice at p < .01. The only one independent variable, procedural justice is statistically insignificant at p = .797.

Regular Econometric Format
The results of regression analysis indicate that the three facets of organizational justice namely distributive justice, interactive justice and informational justice statistically significant and contribute positively towards the dependent variable, job satisfaction. Distributive justice contributes .098 units, interactive justice contributes .079 units and informational justice contributes .317 units in job satisfaction for each unit increase in independent variable whereas the contribution of procedural justice is zero or negligible due to statistically insignificant.

Discussion
The findings of the One-Sample t-Test result indicate that the majority of the faculty members are satisfied with their respective jobs. The reason for their satisfaction could be their job security as they are working in public sector universities or they are satisfied due to government jobs in the continuously changing conditions of Afghanistan. Another reason might be they are getting handsome salaries, respect, promotion opportunities, etc. This finding of the current study is similar to the previous studies of Saba (2011) andAbushaira (2012).
The findings of the result of multiple regressions indicate that distributive justice, interactive justice, and informational justice are the good predictors of employees' job satisfaction being statistically significant. This finding is similar to the previous study of Malik & Naeem (2011). The study found that procedural justice is not a predictor of job satisfaction and this is in contrast to the findings of Nojani et al. (2012).

Conclusions and Recommendations
The current study examined the impact of organizational justice on job satisfaction of public sector university employees in Afghanistan. The research gathered data from 240 university employees using a purposive sampling technique. The data analysis was carried out using various statistical tools such as reliability analysis, one sample t-test and multiple regressions. The result indicated that the majority of the employees were satisfied with their respective jobs. The analysis of multiple regression indicated that distributive justice, interactive justice, and informational justice were the best predictors of employees' job satisfaction at the university level whereas the procedural justice was turned down being statistically insignificant. It is concluded from the research results that the three facets of organizational justice i.e. distributive justice, interactive justice, and informational justice have a positive impact on employees' job satisfaction at the university level.
It is concluded that the findings of the research are consistent with previous researches except one that procedural justice is not found significant predictor of employees' job satisfaction. The role of organizational justice is vital and has positive effects on employees' job satisfaction.
It is recommended for future researchers to include other methods and samples including private-sector employees in conducting their research for capturing their attention for clear understanding of the organizational justice and employees' job satisfaction at broader level. *****