Procedural Justice, Negative Emotions, and Affective Commitment within Boundary-Spanning Roles: The Conditional Role of Organization-Based Self-Esteem

Procedural justice plays a central role in shaping employees' attitudes toward their organization, yet the emotional processes through which justice perceptions translate into negative emotional experiences remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on Social Exchange Theory, Affective Events Theory, and Conservation of Resources Theory (COR), this study examines affective commitment as a conditional emotional pathway linking procedural justice to negative emotions while identifying organization-based self-esteem (OBSE) as a critical boundary condition. Survey data were collected from 358 boundary-spanning employees, and the proposed moderated mediation model was tested using PROCESS Macro Model 14 with bootstrapping procedures. The results show that procedural justice is positively associated with affective commitment, which in turn is negatively related to negative emotions. The direct effect of procedural justice on negative emotions was nonsignificant, indicating an indirect-only mediation pattern. Furthermore, OBSE moderated the relationship between affective commitment and negative emotions, such that the negative association was significant at low levels of OBSE but became nonsignificant at high levels of OBSE. Accordingly, the indirect effect of procedural justice on negative emotions through affective commitment was conditional on employees' levels of organization-based self-esteem. These findings suggest that affective commitment operates as a conditional emotional pathway through which procedural justice shapes employees' emotional experiences, particularly among those with lower organization-based self-esteem. The study contributes to the justice and emotions literature by clarifying when and for whom procedural justice matters most for emotional well-being.