Roughness of rock joint has generally been characterized based upon geometrical aspects of a two-dimensional surface profile. The appropriate description of joint roughness, however, should consider the features of roughness mobilization at contact areas under normal and shear loads. In this study, direct shear tests were conducted on the replicas of tensile fractured gneiss joints and the influence of the shear direction on the shear behavior and effective roughness was examined. In this procedure, a joint surface was represented as a group of triangular planes, and the steepness of each plane was characterized using the concepts of the active and inactive micro-slope angles. The contact areas at peak strength which were estimated by a numerical method showed that the locations of the contact areas were mainly dependent on the distribution of the micro-slope angle and the shear behavior of joint was dominated by only the fractions with active micro-slope angles. Therefore, a three-dimensional coefficient for the quantification of rock joint roughness is proposed based on the distribution of active micro-slope angle: active roughness coefficient, $C_r$. Comparison of the active roughness coefficient and the peak shear strength obtained from the experiment suggests that the active roughness coefficient is the effective parameter to quantify the surface roughness and estimate the shear behavior of rock joint.