When Justice Works: Testing the Uncertainty Management Model among Italian employees”.

Organizational justice can play an important role in buffering the harmful effects of job insecurity on work attitudes and behaviours (e.g. Brockner and Greenberg, 1990). There is widespread empirical evidence of the positive role of organisational justice, building on social exchange theory as theoretical explanation (e.g. Cohen-Charash and Spector, 2001). A limitation of social exchange-based explanations of employee behaviour is that these theories do not specify the conditions under which fairness concerns become important for employees. An alternative model that states accounts for this omission is Uncertainty Management Theory (UMT: Lind and Van den Bos, 2002). According to UMT, people especially rely on justice information when they are confronted with uncertainty: in this condition fairness judgements have a stronger impact on a variety of outcomes. This study tested the Uncertainty Management Model among Italian employees. In accordance with the model, we hypothesize that organizational justice moderates the negative relationship between job insecurity and work attitudes (commitment and satisfaction) and behaviours (performance and organizational citizenship behaviour). We hypothesise that the effects of job insecurity on outcomes will be particularly strong in an unjust job situation. Consequently, high job insecurity together with low organizational justice will be associated with low levels of organizational commitment, job satisfaction, job performance and organizational citizenship behaviours; in turn, negative effects of the job insecurity for work attitudes and behaviours are moderated by high perceived justice. Data will be gathered in an organization of north-east of Italy, including temporary and permanent workers. The results will be presented at the conference.