What Organizational Justice Brings to Project Dispute Negotiation

Abstract

Negotiators having the intention to settle (ITS) is crucial to accomplishing the negotiated settlement of construction disputes. Organizational justice (i.e., procedural, distributive, and interactional justice) might be the root influencer of negotiation settlement. Applying organizational justice theory and the concept of social motive, this study proposes a justice–motive–ITS framework to explore how different justice dimensions affect negotiators’ ITS. It is postulated that negotiators who perceive a high level of organizational justice would encourage prosocial motive and suppress proself motive, thereby being more inclined to settle disputes. Furthermore, trust is tested as a boundary condition (i.e., moderator) to manifest a more real project dispute negotiation situation. Observations by project dispute negotiators in Hong Kong were tested with the partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method. The results indicated that distributive and interactional justice can affect ITS by enhancing negotiators’ prosocial motive, while procedural justice is more functional to facilitate ITS by both incentivizing the prosocial motive and disincentivizing the proself motive. Trust is also identified as an effective moderator in bridging organizational justice with settlement intention. The findings enrich the current knowledge base by providing a nuanced comprehension of negotiation settlement with regard to the three dimensions of organizational justice. Pragmatic recommendations are provided to foster bona fide dispute negotiation in construction projects.