Human values and organizational justice in the context of the assignments and relocation of police commissioners in a Brazilian state police

Abstract

The study focuses on a relatively unexplored relationship in the scientific field: individual human values as predictors of organizational justice. The research context was the distribution and transfer of job positions across units within a Brazilian police organization, considered a highly important organizational resource by the participants (N=206). The variables were measured using the Portrait Value Questionnaire Refined, PVQ-R (Schwartz et al., 2012; Torres et al., 2016), and the Organizational Justice Perception Scale, OJPS (Mendonça et al., 2003). Overall means revealed that the police commissioners are motivated by conservation and self-enhancement values, with low perception of organizational justice in the distribution and mobility about job posts, particularly regarding the procedures adopted for decision-making. Inferential analyses indicated the predictive power of conservation values on distributive justice (R² = 0.043) and procedural justice (R² = 0.068), while openness to change values predicted interactional justice (R² = 0.022). The direction of significant correlations was in harmony with the sinusoidal nature of the Schwartz Motivational Continuum. The results suggest that the distribution of job location and relocation may represent uncertainty, activating the perception of police officers driven by conservation goals and reducing the perception of distributive and procedural justice, while those with opposing goals reported a higher perception of interactional justice.