"Fair or Not?": The Impact of Remote Working on Organizational Justice during Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

With remote-working increased due to the social-distancing during the Covid-19 Pandemic, remote-working is more salient for organizations. Existing literature places remote-working as an antecedent to perceptions of Organizational Justice. Pre-pandemic, the literature presents work-from-home in a positive frame of reference. In the Covid-19 environment, many perceptions have changed regarding employment. Likely overall perceptions regarding work-from-home have shifted because more people engage in remote-working. We argue perceptions of work-from-home through the frame of reference found in Organizational Justice literature have negatively shifted. To study this phenomenon, we gathered social media data in comments from a work discussion forum on Reddit. We coded the data with an a priori code-set and assigned dummy variables for analysis. That dataset was analyzed via a five-way Factorial ANOVA examining the influences of the four independent variables of Organizational Justice (Distributive, Procedural, Interpersonal, and Informational Justice) and the temporal occurrence of Covid-19 on the sentimental polarity of comments surrounding the topic of work-from-home. Results indicated Informational Justice is a significant contributor to more negative sentiment regarding work-from-home. When Distributive, Interpersonal, and Informational Justice and Distributive and Informational Justice interact, sentimental polarity grows more negative for work-from-home. Discussion of results, implications for practice, and limitations presented.

Keywords: Remote Working, Organizational Justice, Informational Justice, Fairness Perception