The Impact of Met-expectation of Organizational Justice on Attitudinal and Behavioral Outcomes of Intercollegiate Athletics Coaches

The purposes of this study were to examine coaches’ perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice regarding current resource distribution systems in intercollegiate athletics in terms of sport types (high profile sports vs. low profile sports) and gender of players (male participant sports vs. female participant sports) and the impacts of direct or indirect organizational justice on coaches’ attitudinal (job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment toward organization and supervisor) and behavioral (organizational citizenship behavior for organization and supervisor) outcomes through the mediating effects of met expectations, outcome satisfaction, and social exchange relationships (perceived organizational support and leader-member exchange) via a multifoci perspective. The data were collected through online surveys of 260 coaches among 1,200 coaches contacted at NCAA Division I, II, and III institutions. The survey questionnaire consisted of demographics, organizational justice, met expectations, outcome satisfaction, leader-member exchange (LMX), perceived organizational support (POS), job satisfaction, employee commitment (organizational commitment and supervisor commitment), and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB to benefit an organization and OCB to benefit a supervisor).

Descriptive statistics were incorporated to provide demographic information of the sample and means and standardized deviations for each construct. Cronbach alpha coefficients were calculated and reported for the components of each measurement scale to verify internal consistency. MANOVA were utilized to explore differences of perceptions of organizational justice in terms of gender of sport and type of sport. Finally, SEM was incorporated to examine the measurement model by conducting a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and to test the proposed structural model of this study.

The results of this study provided some important information. First, coaches of all groups based on gender of sports and type of sports reported below the scale’s midpoint and there were no significant differences among the groups. Second, the proposed mediating effects of met expectation of organizational justice were not supported. Third, procedural justice indirectly influenced attitudinal outcomes (e.g., job satisfaction and organizational commitment), while distributive justice did not directly or indirectly influence those outcomes. Finally, procedural justice eventually influenced organizational citizenship behaviors through the mediating effects of POS and coaches’ job satisfaction and commitment.