When Fairness Fails to Motivate: Organizational Justice and Minimum-Compliance Behavior in Public Sector Employees

Organizational justice has long been regarded as a central driver of employee motivation, commitment, and performance. However, most empirical evidence on justice outcomes is derived from private sector contexts, where employees can respond to perceived unfairness through turnover or overt withdrawal. In public sector organizations, high job security and rigid employment structures substantially alter these response patterns. Employees who perceive injustice often remain in their positions while adjusting their behavior in less visible ways.This study introduces minimum-compliance behavior as a distinct and underexplored response to perceived organizational injustice in public organizations. Minimum-compliance behavior refers to a pattern in which employees strictly adhere to formal job requirements while deliberately withholding discretionary effort, initiative, and proactive engagement. Drawing on organizational justice theory, this research examines how distributive, procedural, and interactional justice shape minimum-compliance behavior through their effects on trust in management and intrinsic motivation.Using survey data collected from public sector employees, the proposed model is tested through structural equation modeling. The results indicate that procedural and interactional justice play a more critical role than distributive justice in preventing minimum-compliance behavior. Trust in management and intrinsic motivation partially mediate these relationships, highlighting the psychological mechanisms through which fairness perceptions translate into behavioral restraint rather than overt disengagement.This study makes three contributions. First, it conceptualizes and empirically operationalizes minimum-compliance behavior as a distinct form of withdrawal specific to public sector employment contexts. Second, it clarifies the differential effects of justice dimensions on behavioral compliance beyond traditional outcomes such as job satisfaction or turnover intention. Third, it offers practical insights for public human resource management by demonstrating that fairness failures do not necessarily produce visible resistance but may quietly erode organizational effectiveness through behavioral minimalism.

کلیدواژه ها:

Organizational justice ، Minimum-compliance behavior ، Public sector employees ، Procedural justice ، Interactional justice ، Trust in management ، Intrinsic motivation ، Public human resource management