Organizational justice principles and large-scale change: the case of program management

Many of the barriers to implementation of large-scale change in healthcare organizations seem to be related to a lack of attention to the human change that needs to occur. One element of this human dimension that change agents overlook is the role that perception of fairness to employees plays in implementing large-scale organizational change. This article uses program management (an organizational design that has been implemented in many healthcare facilities across Canada) as an example of large-scale structural change and demonstrates the importance of applying procedural and interactional justice principles to enhance the implementation of organizational change.