People-orientation Culture and Perceptions of Interpersonal Justice in Nigerian Organizations: Does Leadership Make a Difference?

This article reports an investigation of the relationship between the degrees of importance organizations had attached to their employees and the extent to which the employees had been treated with respect and dignity by their immediate superiors; as well as the mediating role leadership effectiveness had played in the relationship. Different cadres of 472 employees were surveyed, across organizations in South-Western Nigeria, with the aid of a questionnaire comprising relevant, standardized measures. Data analyses were carried out with the aid of a Hierarchical Regression Analysis (HRA), a multiple regression analysis, and three simple regression analyses. The results of the HRA showed significant predictions of interpersonal justice by both people-orientation culture (β=0.140, t=3.145, P<0.01) and leadership effectiveness (β=0.301, t=6.498, P<0.01) after controlling for relevant variables including Leader-Follower Relationship. And, as revealed by the multiple and simple regression analyses, all-four conditions for the mediation of the relationship between people-orientation culture and interpersonal justice by leadership effectiveness—as stipulated by Baron and Kenny (1986)—were met. A Med-Graph (Jose, 2003, 2009), constructed to depict the degree and pattern of the mediation, showed the Sobel z-value to be significant (z = 6.260, p < 0.01) confirming that the mediation was significant. The graph further showed leadership effectiveness to be highly instrumental to the predictive relationship between people-orientation culture and interpersonal justice, solely accounting for about 43% of the variance in interpersonal justice. Among other things, these results support the position of extant literature about the key role of modeling culture, generally, and culture of fairness, specifically, that leaders are supposed to be playing in organizations and societies.