Fairly Meaningful: Linking Organizational Fairness with Perceived Meaningfulness via Four Mediators

We investigated the relationship between organizational fairness and employee perceived meaningfulness. According to Rosso, Dekas, and Wrzesniewski’s (2010) theoretical framework on work meaningfulness and relevant justice theories and literature, we proposed and tested a multiple-mediator model connecting organizational fairness with perceived meaningfulness through four mediators corresponding to the four generic paths to meaningfulness: organization-based self-esteem (OBSE), authenticity at work, moral identification, and organizational identification. Two field studies generally provided support to the mediation effects of these four mediators. In addition, OBSE emerged as a key mediator that was found to uniquely contribute to meaningfulness in both samples, and the other mediators accounted for unique variance of the indirect effect of organizational fairness inconsistently across samples. Our research advances our understanding of the antecedents of meaningfulness by demonstrating the effect of organizational fairness via four theoretically driven mediators.