If You Feel Bad, It's Unfair: A Quantitative Synthesis of Affect and Organizational Justice Perceptions

Whereas research interest in both individual affect/temperament and organizational justice has grown substantially in recent years, affect's role in the perception of organizational justice has received scant attention. Here, the authors integrate these literatures and test bivariate relationships between state affect (e.g., moods), trait affect (e.g., affectivity), and organizational justice variables using meta-analytically aggregated effect sizes. Results indicated that state and trait positive and negative affect exhibit statistically significant relationships with perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice in the predicted directions, with mean population-level correlations ranging in absolute magnitude from = .09 to = .43. Correlations involving state affect generally were larger but not significantly different from those involving trait affect. Finally, the authors propose ideas for investigations at the primary-study level.