Organizational justice and insomnia: Relationships between justice components and insomnia symptoms among private company workers in Japan

Organizational Justice and Health: Reviewing Two Decades of Studies

Organizational justice refers to employees’ perceptions of the fairness of decision-making rules and policies in the workplace. Lack of justice is suggested to be a significant psychosocial risk factor that affects employees’ attitudes and health. The aim of this narrative review was to compile the evidence available about the effects of organizational justice on health. To this end, a literature search was carried out using the Web of Science, PubMed, and PsycINFO databases. The final sample consisted of 103 articles that studied the effects of justice on mental health (40 results), job stress (26), sickness absence (15), physical health (14), absenteeism/presenteeism (3), safety at work (3), and health of third parties (2). The results show that perceptions of workplace justice predict employees’ mental health, stress-related health problems, and lower levels of sickness absence were relatively compelling. Future studies should focus on less-researched outcomes and on how these associations are modified by other variables for a better understanding of how justice affects health, with a view to being able to carry out preventive measures more efficiently.

Change in organizational justice as a predictor of insomnia symptoms: longitudinal study analysing observational data as a non-randomized pseudo-trial

Background

Despite injustice at the workplace being a potential source of sleep problems, longitudinal evidence remains scarce. We examined whether changes in perceived organizational justice predicted changes in insomnia symptoms.

Methods

Data on 24 287 Finnish public sector employees (82% women), from three consecutive survey waves between 2000 and 2012, were treated as ‘pseudo-trials’. Thus, the analysis of unfavourable changes in organizational justice included participants without insomnia symptoms in Waves 1 and 2, with high organizational justice in Wave 1 and high or low justice in Wave 2 (N = 6307). In the analyses of favourable changes in justice, participants had insomnia symptoms in Waves 1 and 2, low justice in Wave 1 and high or low justice in Wave 2 (N = 2903). In both analyses, the outcome was insomnia symptoms in Wave 3. We used generalized estimating equation models to analyse the data.

Results

After adjusting for social and health-related covariates in Wave 1, unfavourable changes in relational organizational justice (i.e. fairness of managerial behaviours) were associated with increased odds of developing insomnia symptoms [odds ratio = 1.15; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.02-1.30]. A favourable change in relational organizational justice was associated with lower odds of persistent insomnia symptoms (odds ratio = 0.83; 95% CI 0.71-0.96). Changes in procedural justice (i.e. the fairness of decision-making procedures) were not associated with insomnia symptoms.

Conclusions

These data suggest that changes in perceived relational justice may affect employees’ sleep quality. Decreases in the fairness of managerial behaviours were linked to increases in insomnia symptoms, whereas rises in fairness were associated with reduced insomnia symptoms.

The relationship between sleep disturbances and depression in daytime workers: a cross-sectional structured interview survey

The aim of this study was to clarify the relationship between sleep disturbances and depression in daytime workers using a structured interview. A total of 1,184 daytime workers were enrolled. We evaluated difficulty initiating sleep (DIS), difficulty maintaining sleep (DMS), early morning awakening (EMA), and global insomnia scores (ISs) in all participants. As a result, the prevalences of DIS, DMS, and EMA were 16%, 46%, and 22 %, respectively. IS was significantly correlated with depression score. Additionally, although all IS subscales (i.e., DIS, DMS, and EMA) were significantly associated with depression score, the main factor contributing to depression score was DIS. Thus, the present study reveals that sleep disturbances and especially DIS are associated with depression in daytime workers.