This paper examines the effect of organisational justice on job satisfaction among permanent staff at the National Examinations Council (NECO) headquarters, Minna, Nigeria. Drawing on equity theory, social exchange theory, and Herzberg’s two-factor theory, the study conceptualises organisational justice along three dimensions — distributive, procedural, and interactional — and investigates their individual and combined effects on employee job satisfaction. The paper synthesises findings from a cross-sectional survey administered to 210 respondents drawn through stratified random sampling from a population of 1,250 permanent staff. Data were collected using Colquitt’s (2001) Organisational Justice Scale and an adapted version of the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ), with all items measured on a five-point Likert scale. Descriptive results reveal that interactional justice recorded the highest mean score (M = 3.45), followed by job satisfaction (M = 3.21), procedural justice (M = 3.12), and distributive justice (M = 2.98), all within the moderate range. Simple and multiple linear regression analyses demonstrate that all three justice dimensions significantly predict job satisfaction individually, and that together they account for a substantial proportion of variance in satisfaction scores. Interactional justice emerges as the strongest individual predictor, consistent with the hierarchical authority structures prevalent in Nigerian public sector organisations. The paper contributes original empirical evidence to a hitherto under-examined institutional context and provides actionable recommendations for improving justice-related management practices within NECO and analogous federal agencies.
Keywords: Interactional Justice, Job Satisfaction, NECO, Nigerian public sector, Organisational Justice, Procedural Justice, distributive justice
