Developing the Healthy and Competitive Organization in the Sports Environment: Focused on the Relationships between Organizational Justice, Empowerment and Job Performance

As improving the job performance of employees is becoming increasingly significant for organizational growth, a major challenge for organizational development managers is to understand and explore the important antecedents of job performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the structural relationships between organizational justice, empowerment, and job performance in the South Korean professional sports industry. Recently, many professional sports teams in South Korea have attempted to improve employees’ job performance for the future survival of the teams. The research participants were 371 employees affiliated with 40 male professional sports teams. The validity and reliability of the measures involved were investigated by carrying out confirmatory factor, Cronbach’s alpha, and correlation analyses. A structural equation-modeling test with a maximum likelihood estimation was performed to evaluate the structural relationships between distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, empowerment and job performance, and the mediating effects of empowerment. The findings revealed the positive impacts of (a) distributive justice on empowerment, (b) procedural justice on empowerment, (c) interactional justice on empowerment, (d) procedural justice on job performance, and (e) interactional justice on job performance. Furthermore, empowerment fully mediated the relationship between interactional justice and job performance. These findings highlight the importance of increasing organizational justice and empowering employees when managing professional sports organizations.