The Effect of Organizational Justice on Contextual Performance, Counterproductive Work Behaviors, and Task Performance: Investigating the moderating role of ability-based emotional intelligence Dwayne Devonish and Dion Greenidge Department of Management Studies, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Cave Hill, St Michael, Barbados, West Indies. dwayne.devonish@cavehill.uwi.edu This study tested the direct effects of three dimensions of organizational justice – distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice – on contextual performance, counter- productive work behaviors, and task performance. The study also examined the moderating effects of an ability measure of emotional intelligence (EI) on the justice–performance relationship. Based on the data from 211 employees across nine organizations from the private and public sectors in a developing country in the Caribbean, the results revealed that all three justice dimensions had significant effects on task performance, contextual perfor- mance, and counterproductive work behaviors in the expected direction. Composite EI and its four subdimensions (appraisal and expression of emotion in the self, appraisal and recognition of emotion in others, regulation of emotion, and use of emotion) moderated the relationship between procedural justice and contextual performance, but failed to moderate other justice–performance relationships. 1. Introduction O ver the last three decades employees’ perceptions of fairness or justice in the workplace have proven to be a rich and robust research area in organizational research (Cropanzano, Rupp, Mohler, & Schminke, 2001). Not surprisingly, much research has demonstrated that justice is significantly related to important organizational and behavioral outcomes. Such outcomes include, but are not limited to, absenteeism, turnover, counterproductive and prosocial behaviors, and employee task performance. Hence, the study of organizational justice has made significant contributions to the theory and practice of workplace management, and has inspired further theore- tical and empirical efforts to better understand the nature of the concept and its work-related conse- quences. In particular, others have argued that attempts to understand the effects of justice on outcomes such as performance should consider the role of different types of moderating variables as the justice–performance rela- tionship may not be a straightforward one (Nowakowski & Conlon, 2005). As a result, this study examines the moderating role of an ability measure of emotional intelli- gence (EI) in the justice–performance relationship. Perfor- mance is treated as a multidimensional construct, covering both positive employee behaviors such as task performance and contextual performance, and negative employee beha- viors such as counterproductive work behaviors (CWB). The following section presents a selective review of the literature on the key variables to be investigated in this study, followed by the main hypotheses of the research. 1.1. Organizational justice Organizational justice refers to perceptions of fairness within an organizational setting (Greenberg, 1990). Prior research has demonstrated that organizational justice has three distinct dimensions. The first dimension, distribu- tive justice, was the first of the three justice constructs to & 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA, 02148, USA International Journal of Selection and Assessment Volume 18 Number 1 March 2010