Integrating Leader Fairness and Leader-Member Exchange in Predicting Work Engagement: A Contingency Approach

Growing research attention has been devoted to understanding the implications of work engagement with an emphasis on its motivational mechanism linking its antecedents to consequences. Findings from such research efforts could inform intervention efforts. Integrating organizational justice theories within the leadership framework, this study examined the effects of supervisory interactional justice and supervisory procedural justice on subordinates' work engagement. Based on survey responses from 352 Chinese employees collected at two time points with three months in-between, moderated regression analyses were conducted to test hypotheses that there is a direct positive effect of supervisory interactional justice and supervisory procedural justice on subordinate's work engagement respectively, and that leader-member exchange (LMX) quality moderates the justice-engagement relationships. Specifically, the supervisory interactional justice-engagement relationship was expected to be stronger for subordinates with high LMX quality, and the supervisory procedural justice-engagement relationship was expected to be stronger for subordinates with low LMX quality. The results showed that both supervisory interactional justice and supervisory procedural justice significantly correlated with subordinate-reported work engagement measured three months later. However, the results did not support the proposed main and interactive effect hypotheses after adding control variables. Supplemental analysis results demonstrated that supervisory interactional justice and supervisory procedural justice had significant indirect effects on work engagement through LMX quality. Further, POS was found to moderate the indirect effects of supervisory interactional justice. But POS was not a moderator for supervisory procedural justice. Moreover, emotional labor job type interacted with supervisory interactional justice in predicting vigor, such that supervisory interactional justice was significantly and negatively related to vigor when higher emotional labor is involved. In conclusion, the findings of the current study contribute to work engagement, leader fairness and social exchange theory literature and provide important theoretical and practical implications for future research in the field of work engagement and leader fairness.