When Fairness Backfires: Glass Ceiling Perceptions, Alienation, and Career Satisfaction

Abstract

Glass ceiling perceptions signal persistent gendered barriers to advancement, yet their psychological and career-related consequences remain insufficiently understood. Organizational justice is typically assumed to function as a protective resource that buffers employees from the negative effects of such barriers. Challenging this assumption, we propose an expectations-violation perspective, suggesting that when organizations are perceived as generally fair, the presence of glass ceiling barriers becomes especially salient and more likely to be internalized as organizational alienation, ultimately undermining career satisfaction. Using survey data from employees in the public and private sectors in Montenegro (n = 701) and testing a first-stage moderated mediation model, we show that glass ceiling perceptions are more strongly associated with alienation in high-justice contexts than in low-justice contexts, and that alienation is in turn linked to lower career satisfaction. By identifying organizational alienation as a key mechanism and revealing a counterintuitive role of organizational justice, this study extends glass ceiling research beyond documenting inequality to explaining when and why it is most psychologically and career-damaging, with important implications for organizations that rely on general fairness initiatives while leaving structural advancement barriers unaddressed.