This study empirically investigates the effects of organizational justice in performance-based pay systems on job satisfaction, turnover intention, and organizational trust among employees of hotpot and Sichuan cuisine restaurants in Sichuan, China. A...
This study empirically investigates the effects of organizational justice in performance-based pay systems on job satisfaction, turnover intention, and organizational trust among employees of hotpot and Sichuan cuisine restaurants in Sichuan, China. A total of 304 valid responses were collected and analyzed using SPSS 27.0 through exploratory factor analysis, reliability and validity tests, correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, and bootstrap mediation testing. Specifically, organizational trust refers to employees’ belief in their organization’s fairness, honesty, and reliability, serving as a key mediating variable linking justice perceptions and employee outcomes. Job satisfaction denotes the degree of positive emotional response employees experience toward their work and reward system, while turnover intention represents their conscious and deliberate desire to leave the organization. By clarifying these constructs, this study provides a more comprehensive understanding of how fairness perceptions in performance-based pay systems affect both attitudinal and behavioral outcomes in the catering industry. The results indicate that distributive and interactional justice significantly and positively affect organizational trust, while procedural justice shows no significant effect. Organizational justice positively influences job satisfaction and negatively affects turnover intention. Moreover, organizational trust plays a mediating role between certain justice dimensions and employee outcomes. These findings highlight that among the dimensions of justice perception, distributive and interactional fairness are key determinants of organizational trust. Hence, companies in the catering industry should emphasize genuine communication and interpersonal fairness rather than merely formal procedural fairness when designing performance-based pay systems.