Understanding Justice at Work: The Interplay of Social Comparison and Psychological Contract in the Healthcare Industry

The healthcare sector is characterized by high stress, irregular working conditions, and continuous performance pressure, which increase employees’ sensitivity to workplace fairness and peer evaluation. Within this context, the way employees compare themselves to other colleagues and how employees interpret their psychological contracts with their employers become worth examining. Drawing on Equity Theory and Social Exchange Theory, our study aims to examine how social comparison affects healthcare employees’ perceptions of organizational justice and to reveal the mediating role of the psychological contract in this relationship. Data were collected from 364 healthcare employees in Türkiye. Validity, reliability, and correlation analyses were conducted, and a structural equation model was established based on the collected data. The results indicate that social comparison has a positive effect on both organizational justice and the psychological contract, and the psychological contract also positively affects organizational justice. Accordingly, the psychological contract partially mediates the relationship between social comparison and organizational justice. Hence, our study extends the extant literature by identifying the psychological contract as a mediating cognitive mechanism linking social comparison and justice perceptions. Practical implications are offered to healthcare managers and organizations to promote fairness and engagement among staff. © The Author(s) 2026. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).