A study of investigating organisational justice perceptions and experiences of affirmative action in a learning and development organisation

Abstract

Affirmative Action (AA) is the main legislated strategy used to address the organisational challenge of equal employment opportunity in the workplace. South Africa finds itself over fifteen years into a hard fought democracy where the challenge is to address previous workplace, employee and organisational injustices and paving the way forward to committed, integrated, co-ordinated and fair employment. Organisational justice, similarly, is concerned with the central interest of fairness among managers in the provision of equal employment opportunities and also refers to employees’ perceptions of fairness in the organisational setting. Conceptually and theoretically it can be divided into three components; distributive justice, procedural justice and interactional justice. An important point to make right at the outset is that affirmative action ties into the theory of organisational justice by together representing fair and equal opportunity for all employees to compete and be assessed using pre-determined criteria. The Employment Equity Act (EEA) 55 of 1998 provides for AA measures in the workplace with established frameworks to address the employment of designated groups defined as black people, woman and people with disabilities. Black people are further defined to include Africans, coloureds and Indians. EEA enforcement is the responsibility of the department of labour and further provides codes of good practice to employees in implementing AA policies.