Stop filling in the gaps! Rethinking organizational justice through problematization

Organizational justice theory is the dominant approach to study justice in organization. It focuses on the justice perception and its influence on outcomes such as performance, theft, or justice climate. This article aims at paving new ways to tackle this issue. To do so, we propose a problematization of organizational justice theory, which leads to reveal unquestioned, but core assumptions of the theory, to challenge them, to suggest alternatives, and to evaluate these new propositions. Critical theory and sociology of critique are the two theoretical resources we used to apply a dialectical problematization. They provide counter-texts against the functionalist stance of organizational justice theory. Therefore, this paper makes three contributions. It is one of the first systematic applications of the problematization methodology, and challenge de dominant framework to think justice in organizations.