the relationship of organizational justice with nurses’ professional commitment

background and aim: nurses are among the main contributors to patient care and are in direct contact with patients. nurses’ professional commitment can affect their job satisfaction and retention in nursing and enhance patient safety and care quality. therefore, identifying factors behind their professional commitment is crucial. one of the factors which may affect professional commitment is organizational justice. this study was made in 2014 to evaluate the correlation of organizational justice and professional commitment among nurses working in teaching hospitals located in birjand, iran.  materials and methods: in this descriptive-analytical study, 215 nurses working in valiasr (pbuh) and imam reza (pbuh) teaching hospitals, birjand, iran, were recruited through stratified random sampling.a demographic questionnaire, the nurses’ professional commitment scale, and the organizational justice questionnaire were used for data collection. professional commitment was evaluated in the five subscales of understanding of nursing, nursing compliance, involvement of nursing professionals, devotion to nursing, and retention of nursing professionals while the three assessed dimensions of organizational justice were distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. the spss software (v. 16.0) was used for conducting one-way analysis of variance, multiple regression analysis, and the statistical tests of independent-samples t, tukey’s post-hoc, and pearson correlation at a significance level of less than 0.05.  results: the mean scores of nurses’ professional commitment and perceived organizational justice were respectively 3.85±0.56 and 4.44±1.7, indicating high professional commitment and moderate organizational justice among the participating nurses. there was a significant correlation between organizational justice and professional commitment (r=0.54 and p<0.001). moreover, the mean scores of professional commitment and organizational justice and all their subscales among nurses working in imam reza hospital were significantly greater than the nurses working in valiasr hospital (p<0.001). conclusion: healthcare managers can adopt strategies and make wise decisions for enhancing nurses’ professional commitment through improving their perceived organizational justice.