The Effect of Organizational Justice on Employees’ Positive Evaluation of WLB Policies

Abstract

This research aims to clarify the factors that contribute to the positive evaluation and utilization of WLB policies by employees without causing hesitation or difficulty in using such policies, based on the facts that despite active implementations of WLB support policies by many companies, the actual utilization is often not so promoted or even not a few employees feel hesitated to use them.

This paper intends to clarify what prevents or discourages employees from using WLB policies by analyzing previous research that focus on that point. To clarify this, the authors focus on bias and inequity in organizational management as a factor that hesitates or inhibits the use of WLB policies. This paper also aims to elucidate the effect of perceived fairness in various procedures and distributions in organizations, so called “Organizational Justice” on the ease of use and evaluation of WLB policies by employees. The statistical analysis was conducted based on a survey data (94 samples for companies and 1,010 samples for individuals). The analysis revealed that the implementation of WLB support policies itself does not always lead to employeesʼ positive evaluation of the WLB policies or ease of use, but the more employees have a perception of organizational justice, the higher the evaluation of such companiesʼ WLB policies. As a theoretical contribution derived from the analysis and discussion in this paper, it was shown that organizational justice, which has not been considered in connection with WLB in most of previous research, is considered as an important concept for the effective functioning of WLB policies in relation with organizational management.