Organizational justice, life satisfaction, and happiness: the mediating role of workplace social courage

Abstract

Purpose

Workplace social courage is a courageous behavior that can damage the actor's social relationships, social image and accrue face-loss costs. Sometimes, it is difficult to differentiate courageous behavior from incivility that predicts higher levels of psychological distress. While workplace social courage is widely discussed in the management literature, less is known about the conditions under which individuals are more or less likely to exhibit courageous behaviors. Given the theoretical considerations, in the present study, the authors consider two indicators of quality of life, which are life satisfaction and happiness, and set the aim of the study as to investigate the relationships between organizational justice and two dimensions of quality of life – life satisfaction and happiness – with particular attention to the mediation function performed by courage.

Design/methodology/approach

Cross-sectional survey data (n = 408) were obtained from employees working in Turkey Fortune companies and analyzed with variance-based structural equation modeling (VB-SEM) technique.

Findings

The results showed that perceived organizational justice is a strong antecedent for workplace social courage. Workplace social courage emerges as a facilitator for subjective happiness and life satisfaction. Workplace social courage mediated the association between perceived organizational justice and subjective happiness, and between perceived organizational justice and life satisfaction. Prescriptions for theory development and practitioners are highlighted, research limitations and future directions are acknowledged.

Originality/value

So far, most of the work done in this subject is mainly in western countries, and it is considered as a virtue, feature, emotion and behavior in the studies of social scientists, and mainly focused on how employees need the courage to perform the desired behaviors that affect organizational outcomes positively such as organizational citizenship behavior, job performance, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, psychological well-being. Also, the authors studied how social courage positively relates to beneficial voice and silence, as well as negatively relates to detrimental voice and silence, how courage is correlated with psychological empowerment, coaching and how courage mediates on quality of life. As can be seen, there is little empirical work when it comes to the antecedents of courage in business life. Therefore, this study, which has been done with different variables in a different culture and country, aims to support and bring a new breath to the subject. Besides, the mediating effect of courage on the organizational variables is also among the trendiest subjects.

Citation

Mert, İ.S., Sen, C. and Alzghoul, A. (2022), "Organizational justice, life satisfaction, and happiness: the mediating role of workplace social courage", Kybernetes, Vol. 51 No. 7, pp. 2215-2232. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-02-2021-0116