Yours truly: the role of organizational commitment in shoplifting prevention

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how interactional justice within a retail context may influence employee organizational commitment and how this may evoke guardianship behaviors that manifest in shoplifting prevention.

Design/methodology/approach: This research uses a phenomenological approach conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews with 26 shop-floor employees of two major national supermarket chains in New Zealand.

Findings: The findings suggest that interactional justice in the workplace is important in shaping organizational commitment amongst employees. Additionally, heightened organizational commitment may have a significant effect on employee propensity to engage in shoplifting prevention/guardianship behavior. A conceptual model is developed based on these findings.

Practical implications: Retail managers may promote and exercise interactional justice practices with employees to improve their organizational commitment and consequential shoplifting prevention/ guardianship behaviors.

Originality/value: The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, and from a theoretical perspective, it offers both a conceptual foundation and empirical-based evaluation of interactional justice and its effect on organizational commitment and, specifically, on guardianship/shoplifting prevention behaviors. Second, and from a pragmatic perspective, the conceptual model derived from this research may assist retailers in developing interactional justice strategies that encourage organizational commitment of employees that consequently leads to employees’ guardianship/shoplifting prevention behaviors. Finally, it explores significance and role of employee perceptions of interactional justice, employee workplace attachment and organizational commitment within the context of retail crime prevention.