Professionals in public and municipal human-service organizations who reported greater cost consciousness, meaning a stronger focus on the costs of their work, also tended to report greater resource efficiency, according to a survey in Türkiye. Perceived organizational justice, the study’s term for how fair people saw their organization’s processes, was tied to both measures and statistically accounted for part of the link. The result does not show that being more cost-conscious caused better resource use, or that fairness caused the relationship: the data were collected at one point in time.
The strongest of the three pairwise links was between cost consciousness and resource efficiency. Their Pearson correlation was 0.587, and the reported p-value was below 0.01. Cost consciousness and organizational justice had a correlation of 0.500, while justice and resource efficiency had a correlation of 0.449, also with reported p-values below 0.01. A Pearson correlation measures how closely two sets of scores move together; it cannot by itself identify which came first or why.
The pattern in the scores
In a regression model examining cost consciousness and organizational justice, the reported coefficient was 0.500 and the model explained 25% of the variation in justice scores. In the model that included both cost consciousness and justice to predict resource efficiency, the reported direct cost-consciousness coefficient was 0.384, the justice coefficient was 0.207, and the model explained 37.7% of the variation. The results narrative also reported a total cost-consciousness to resource-efficiency coefficient of 0.466, with 34.5% of the variation explained.
The study’s mediation test estimated the indirect association through organizational justice at 0.104. Its 95% confidence interval, the range used to show uncertainty around the estimate, ran from 0.047 to 0.160, so the interval excluded zero, and the authors described the pattern as partial mediation. In plain terms, the association between cost consciousness and resource efficiency remained after organizational justice was added to the model, while part of the statistical relationship also ran through the justice measure. That is evidence of a statistical pathway in these data, not proof of a causal chain.
A survey of workplace perceptions
The analysis drew on 246 professionals working in public and municipal human-service institutions in Türkiye. The participants included social workers, nurses and administrative personnel. The study was a quantitative, cross-sectional correlational survey: no intervention was administered, and the measures were collected during one data-collection period.
The authors created human-service-organization-specific scales, and a panel of five academics reviewed the item pool. The analyses reported single-factor structures for the scales. Cost consciousness and resource efficiency each accounted for approximately 69% of the variance in their measures, while organizational justice accounted for more than 76%; Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were above 0.95. Those results describe how the measures performed in the sample, but they do not remove the limits of asking participants to rate their own perceptions.
The main mediation analysis used Hayes’ PROCESS Model 4, with 5,000 bootstrap resamples and 95% confidence intervals; the prespecified significance threshold was a p-value below 0.05. Mediation here meant testing whether the organizational justice score statistically accounted for part of the association between cost consciousness and resource efficiency.
Why the result remains tentative
The largest caution is the study design. Because the survey was cross-sectional, it cannot establish temporal ordering, such as whether cost consciousness came before higher resource-efficiency scores or whether perceptions of fairness changed first. The measures were self-reported, which the authors say may increase common-method bias and social-desirability bias. The sample came from public and municipal organizations in Türkiye, so the results may not carry over to other institutions, settings or cultures.
The reported mediation figures are also internally inconsistent. One set of entries gives 0.587 for the resource-efficiency to cost-consciousness path and 0.483 for the corresponding direct path, while other entries give 0.466 for the total effect and 0.384 for the direct effect. The same reporting lists 0.207 for the organizational-justice path and 0.104 for the indirect effect. Because the results narrative uses 0.466 and 0.384, readers cannot tell from the paper alone which entries were intended for those paths.
The narrower conclusion is that perceived organizational justice was statistically associated with part of the relationship between cost consciousness and self-reported resource efficiency in this sample. The study does not establish that organizational justice is a causal mediator or that the pattern would hold beyond the sampled organizations and setting.
Paper data and sources
Original title: The mediating role of organizational justice in the relationship between cost consciousness and resource efficiency among human service professionals
Authors: Sevgili A, Yürekli E, Çanakci M
Journal/Repository: Frontiers in psychology
Status: Peer-reviewed
First online: 2026-10-19
DOI: Not available
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