a sociological assessment of organizational justice and its relation with the culture of an organization in educational organizations (case study: staff at the ministry of education in mashhad)

extended abstract 1- introduction one of the most important issues in organizational studies is organizational culture as in the past two decades, organizational culture has been identified as a strategic and important factor in the success or failure of organizations. studies emphasize the impact of organizational culture on critical variables such as social responsibility of the organization, job satisfaction, enhanced performance, and commitment. at often times, the current era has been referred to as the era of organizations or organizational life by sociology scholars. therefore, it seems imperative to study the concept of organization and understand organizational phenomena such as organizational culture, as a productive tool and the basis of organizational life, which directs organizational activities. the culture of an organization is a set of rules and values of general consensus, based on which the staff of an organization direct their activities. the culture of an organization plays a key role in the reaction of the staff to organizational matters, and it is influenced by the attitude of individuals. justice is one of the obvious principles in humanity. in our religion, it is one of the main principles, and in collective rationality, it is the authorizing foundation of each organization. compliance of the staff with the culture of an organization depends on their attitude and perception of justice in the organization. theoretical views such as peter blau’s theory of social exchange (1990), adoms’ theory of justice (1987), mcclelland’s needs theory (1985), victor vroom’s expectancy theory (1980) emphasize the perception of justice in social environments and individuals’ responses during various exchanges and believe that there is a meaningful relationship between the perceived justice in an organization and the staff’s involvement and pursuit of the organizational goals. “the higher the perception of a member of a social group or team of justice in the system’s treatment, the more (s)he commits to participate and contribute to the system’s development” (garoosi, 2012, p. 97). the reason for choosing the organization of the ministry of education (primary and secondary education) in this study was the sensitive and valuable role of the system of education in cultural, educational, political, and economic development of a society. “both for long and short term planning, the ministry of education insists on the culture of the organization and variables such as job satisfaction, organizational culture, and staff motivation” (golparvar & nadi, 2010, p. 212). these variables play a key role in improving the wisdom of the educational system (azimi, 2003), and a strong educational system is dependent on the staff who comply with the culture of the organization. every staff member, spending all their time and energy in an organization, wants and expects just treatment. given the importance of the impact of just behavior on the culture of any organization and the influence of justice of an organization on the culture of the system–especially in the case of educational organizations, which owing to their important functions, play an important role in the society–the current study aims to achieve a structural model of the effect of organizational justice on the aspects of the culture of the organization to obtain a sociological understanding of the notion of organization, and as such study the impact of organizational justice on the culture of the organization. 2- theoretical framework according to the theory of organizational justice, staff members expect just behavior from the organization for which they work. thus, when the staff is treated justly and ethically, they are encouraged to spend more time and get involved with their work more properly. that is, if the staff inputs the perception of organizational justice into the system, it affects the organization (structure, processes, and goals) and leads to an output which is a better understanding of the culture of the organization through the pursuit of the goals of the organization. the activists (staff) as agents, cooperate with the organization (structure) and possess reasoning and permanent appreciation of their actions, and are not merely financially motivated, but their understanding of organization justice impacts the culture of the organization. 3- method based on positivism, the theoretical model of the study draws on an eclectic perspective to giddens’ theory (1990) in a systematic approach. the research hypotheses are derived from the theoretical model. as a descriptive and explanatory research, this survey study uses a questionnaire instrument. the target population consists of all the employees at the seven offices under the ministry of education in mashhad and the explanatory setting consists of the executive and clerical expert staff. the sample includes 285 participants which were selected using a stratified random sampling technique. to analyze the data, empirically address the problem of the study, test the hypotheses, and achieve the structural model, software packages of lisrel 8.8, excel, spss v.21 were employed and structural equations (factor analysis and path analysis) were run. 4- results and discussion the structural equation results reveal the goodness of fit and meaningfulness of the model of the impact of organizational justice on culture of the organization. the results also show that the impact of organizational justice on culture of the organization is meaningful at the coefficient value of 0.46 and the highest impact of organizational justice is on the adaptability component with the indirect coefficient value of 0.38. in addition, the liserel output with r2=0.46, r=0.22, t=17.14, reveals and confirms the relations among the latent variables of organizational justice and culture of the organization. that is, there is a relationship between the perception of justice by the staff of an organization and the culture of the organization, and the more justice is perceived in the organization, the higher values of the components of the culture of the organization rise. 5- conclusion and suggestions the main contribution of this research to the field of sociology is providing evidence regarding the impact of the perception of organizational justice on the culture of the organization in educational organizations. as the ministry of education is a state-run and centralized organization where the regulations are enforced systematically, to improve the culture of the organization, measures can be taken to improve the sense of responsibility of the staff which can be realized by planning towards their empowerment. to that end, bureaucratic, voluntary and indirect controls can also be employed so that the staff can acquire adequate skills for making their own work-related decisions. continuous contact and listening to the comments and opinions of the staff and informing them of the process of decision-makings can prove useful in this regard.