Organizational justice has long since been considered multi-dimensional. However, the dimensionality of organizational justice has been stagnant in recent years, consisting primarily of distributive, procedural, interpersonal, and informational justice. When further examining the meaning of justice and fairness in organizations, it becomes apparent that these organizational justice dimensions are not capturing an important element of justice, that being the equality of opportunity. This is an important absence because the opportunity to contribute in organizations will likely affect both organizational outcomes and personal outcomes outside of work. Therefore, building upon previous work, the construct of contributive justice in organizations was introduced and defined as the fairness of opportunities to contribute to core work processes. Contributive justice consists of two dimensions, the equal opportunity to engage in complex labor, and the equal opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. A measure was constructed to capture these dimensions, along with specific subdimensions. In a sample of 534 full-time employees, the results suggested that the contributive justice measure was a reliable two-factor measure that was discriminable from the other organizational justice dimensions and was positively correlated with other variables such as meaningful work, instrumental voice, inclusion, empowerment, and self-esteem. Contributive justice was also found to have incremental validity over the other organizational justice dimensions. These results suggest the importance of contributive justice as an aspect of organizational fairness and employee well-being.
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