The concept of organizational justice has been thoroughly researched for half a century, with attention given to three specific components: distributive justice (concerning outcome allocations), procedural justice (concerning the process followed to reach specific outcomes), and interactional justice (concerning how people are treated during the decision-making process (Colquitt, Greenberg & Zapata-Phelan, 2005). Despite this extensive research, little analysis has been conducted on the temporal evolution of the effect(s) of organizational justice and whether such effect(s) can transfer to variables outside the current employment, extending into the next job. Moreover, organizational justice has not been examined through the lens of the consequences of rational decision-making for individuals and the rationality of justice perceptions.

This thesis aims to fill this research gap by exploring the effects of justice over time and linking them to the concept of rationality. We start with a brief outline in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 explores the effects of past organizational justice and its impact on the rationality of job search: We explore what we mean by more vs. less rational and how this data is correlated, and we confirm with an experiment that shows us that lower levels of past organizational justice lead to less rationality in search. In Chapter 3, we turn our attention to the development of a scale that gauges individual readiness for rational decision-making. Our aim is to ensure that the scale is applicable to many contexts and types of choice, making it relevant for researchers in fields within and outside of the justice literature. In Chapter 4, we look at the rationality of justice perceptions. It might be assumed that it is the actions and outcomes of events that drive the perceptions of event justice. However, this fails to take into account the characteristics of the individual deciding upon the action.Those characteristics may exert an influence on justice perceptions above and beyond the action- and outcomes-based criteria of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice. Thus, in Chapter 4 we explore the question of how agent characteristics may matter. Agent morality affects perceived event justice through dimensional justice perceptions and controlling for dimensional justice. Again, our findings open novel avenues for future research. Chapter five summarizes the findings of this thesis and concludes.