Treat Me Justly If You Want Me to Lead: The association between perceived organizational justice and employees' leadership intentions

The present study investigated the association between employees' organizational justice perceptions and their intentions for taking a leadership role in their current organizations. In order to explore the mechanism behind this mentioned association, affective organizational commitment is integrated into the research model as a mediator variable. The moderator role of worries about leadership (WAL) and motivation to lead (MTL) in this association is also explored, hence, creating a moderated-mediation model. A total of 350 U.S. based white-collar employees (58% male, 41.4% female, and 0.6% other) are recruited as respondents through an online panel data platform (i.e., Amazon Mturk) for this survey research. The analyses showed a full-mediation model, indicating that perceived organizational justice is associated with employees' leadership intentions through affective organizational commitment. Although I found that the relationship between affective commitment and leadership intentions is stronger when the MTL level is higher, the data failed to support the hypotheses on the moderation effect of WAL. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings, and future directions are also discussed in this paper. Keywords: perceived organizational justice, organizational commitment, leadership intention, leader emergence, leadership shortage, worries about leadership (WAL), motivation to lead (MTL)