Asia School of Business

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Shifts and variability in daily interpersonal justice are associated with psychological detachment and affect at home

Yi-Ren Wang, Michael T Ford, Yanxia Wang, Jiafei Jin

To understand the implications of the dynamic nature of daily interpersonal justice, we examined the relationship between daily shifts and variability in interpersonal justice over time and recovery experiences at home. A ten-day daily diary study of 58 workers with 422 observations was conducted. Results from multi-level modeling revealed that daily shifts in interpersonal justice at the within-person level, operationalized as residual changes across consecutive work days, positively predicted daily levels of psychological detachment, which in turn predicted daily levels of positive low-arousal affect at home. Variability in interpersonal justice at the between-person level, operationalized as the standard deviation of interpersonal justice over the ten-day period, was negatively related to the chronic level of psychological detachment, which in turn was related to chronic negative low-arousal affect at home. Variability in interpersonal justice explained unique variance in psychological detachment beyond the average level of interpersonal justice. We conclude that within-person daily shifts in interpersonal justice and between-person differences in interpersonal justice variability over time may play critical roles in the negative spillover of interpersonal injustice from work to home. Practical implications such as training on consistent treatment are discussed.