Procedural justice, transparent communication and change acceptance: An integrative review

Abstract

Orientation: Organisational transformations routinely generated uncertainty, resistance and quiet withdrawal. Procedural justice and transparent communication were examined as governance mechanisms for stabilising change.
Research purpose: The study treated procedural justice and transparent communication as intertwined governance mechanisms in organisational change, with affective commitment and destructive behaviours as the focal outcomes.
Motivation for the study: An interdisciplinary synthesis was needed to explain how participation and structured feedback turned uncertainty into acceptance, providing a conceptual basis for later contextualisation in African human resource management (HRM) settings.
Research approach/design and method: An integrative review synthesised methodologically robust studies from OECD contexts in Q1 and Q2 journals, including longitudinal research and randomised field experiments, to derive a conceptual framework.
Main findings: Transparent communication and clear justification of managerial decisions reduced uncertainty and resistance, while authentic participation operated through psychological ownership. The synthesis identified four parallel mediating pathways, namely perceived organisational support, cognitive and affective trust, psychological ownership and leadership enactment, whose effect sizes varied across boundary conditions.
Practical/managerial implications: Organisations should institutionalise meaningful participation and professionally moderated feedback to reduce implementation frictions and participation fatigue, particularly where uncertainty was high, restructuring was contested and employee relations were complex.
Contribution/value-add: The study reframed procedural justice and transparent communication as both ethical principles and governance mechanisms that explain trust, commitment and implementation effectiveness, and identified research directions for African HRM contexts.