Beyond Organizational Justice: A Systemic Justice Framework for Understanding Persistent Barriers to Black Employees’ Selection and Promotion

Persistent racial inequalities in recruitment, selection and promotion remain evident despite decades of equality legislation, diversity initiatives and organizational reform. While Organizational Justice Theory has advanced understanding of employees’ perceptions and experiences of fairness, it offers a less developed explanation of how organizational systems reproduce inequality over time. This study addresses this limitation by developing a Systemic Justice Framework that extends organizational justice scholarship beyond individual fairness perceptions to the organizational and institutional mechanisms that sustain racial inequality. Drawing on an interpretivist qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 46 Black professionals employed across the UK National Health Service and higher education sector. Data were analysed inductively using Gioia’s methodology and Colaizzi’s phenomenological approach. The findings reveal interconnected forms of procedural, distributive, interpersonal and informational injustice. More importantly, they identify five systemic mechanisms through which inequality is reproduced: leadership accountability failures, HR governance conflicts, organizational cultures of racial normalization, informal power networks and white solidarity, and wider institutional influences. These mechanisms interact recursively, transforming isolated experiences of unfairness into enduring organizational patterns that constrain career progression despite formal commitments to equality. Building on these findings, the study proposes a preliminary Systemic Justice Framework that requires further empirical testing and refinement. The framework contributes to organizational justice, leadership and strategic human resource management scholarship by providing a multi-level explanation of how organizational systems sustain racial inequality and offers practical guidance for governance reforms that strengthen accountability, transparency and organizational learning.