The effect of organisational justice on work engagement: an empirical investigation among female engineers in Malaysia

Abstract

Engineering is considered as a male-dominated field even in the 21st century. As such, factors that influence the engagement of females in the field of engineering continues to remain as a debatable topic among both researchers and practitioners. Thus, this empirical research was initiated to investigate how the perception of organisational justice at a workplace affects the work engagement of female engineers in the Malaysian corporate sector. It was hypothesised that three forms of justice (i.e., distributive, procedural and interactional) will be positively related to the dimensions of work engagement (i.e., vigour, dedication and absorption). An online survey was administered to 250 full-time female engineers from various disciplines and sectors in Malaysia. Structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was applied to test the developed hypotheses. Results showed that procedural justice was significantly and positively related to all three dimensions of work engagement. On the contrary, interactional justice was only significantly and positively related to vigour and dedication dimensions. Finally, distributive justice was not significantly related to any dimensions of work engagement. Findings of this study provide useful insight and implications that the level of work engagement of female engineers can be increased through the positive perception of organisational justice such as establishing proper communication in addition to having fair organisational policies and procedures in the workplace.