Lisa Blomgren Bingham

Organizational justice and workplace mediation: a six‐factor model

Purpose – This study examines the structure and dimensionality of organizational justice in a workplace mediation setting. It has three purposes: to determine whether the procedural and interpersonal justice factors in the four‐factor model of organizational justice can be split, thereby providing support for a six‐factor model; to identify how the split factors relate to other factors in the model; and to uncover any differences in employee and supervisor perceptions of organizational justice in workplace mediation.Design/methodology/approach – Confirmatory factor analysis is used to explore the fit of four different models of organizational justice. The paper examines cross factor correlations to assess the strength and relationships among factors and to look for differences between employees and supervisors.Findings – It is found that a six‐factor model of organizational justice provides the best fit for the data and that factor relationships differ little for employees and supervisors.Research limitat...

Mediating Employment Disputes at the United States Postal Service A Comparison of In-house and Outside Neutral Mediator Models

The United States Postal Service (USPS) has been engaged in experimentation with various models and forms of mediation for employment discrimination disputes since 1994 This study examines perceptions of procedural justice in a natural field experiment An upstate New York USPS district implemented an inside neutral model of mediation -that is, a model using existing USPS employees trained as mediators, for the period 1996 to 1998 In 1998 to the present, the USPS implemented a new, outside neutral model nationwide Under this model, outside neutral indepen dent contractors, compensated but not employed by the USPS, provide mediation services

Teaching Collaborative Leadership: Ideas and Lessons for the Field

This article describes and analyzes a new approach to teaching collaborative leadership to masters of public administration students at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. The 3-year-old course teaches students how to design a collaborative network with the necessary players at the table; structure governance for a collaborative group; negotiate ethically to best leverage resources; facilitate meetings of a network; manage conflict among network members; effectively engage the public, including designing and sequencing civic engagement to make effective use of public knowledge; design useful systems for evaluating the outcomes of collaboration; and operate within the legal constraints on collaborative public agency action. The theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of the course are explained. Ideas and lessons for the field are offered.

Employees, Supervisors, and Workplace Mediation: Experiences of Justice and Settlement

This study explores the experience of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice in workplace mediation in a public organization. The results show that there are significant differences between employees’ and supervisors’ experiences of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice. Moreover, the results indicate that the quality of participants’ interactions in mediation is significantly related to the quality of the mediated outcome in terms of settlement or case resolution. When disputants experience interpersonal justice with each other during mediation, they are more likely to reach a full resolution to the dispute. When disputants corroborate each other’s reports of their own behaviors during mediation, they are also more likely to achieve settlement of the mediation. Disputants who received an apology from the other party were more likely to report a settlement to the dispute. In sum, this field test supports the theory of disputant–disputant interpersonal justice and provides evidence that it is an important element in the mediated resolution of a workplace dispute.

Conclusion: Conflict and Collaboration in Networks

As the authors of the articles in this symposium demonstrate, public managers who work collaboratively in networks find themselves not solely as unitary leaders of unitary organizations. Additionally, they find themselves facilitating and operating in multiorganizational arrangements to solve problems that cannot be solved, or solved easily, by single organizations. Management in networks is different than traditional management in single programs or organizations in several respects. One of the major challenges concerns the management of conflict within the network. The theme of conflict in networks manifests itself in different ways in each of the four core articles in this symposium. Keast, Mandell, and Brown differentiate among cooperation, coordination, and collaboration. Each requires a different level of trust and different way of working together. Each normally requires different structural linkages, degrees of formality, and time. Each presents different risks and rewards. Keast, Mandell, and Brown write about potential conflict among members of collaborative networks who, because of their hectic, demanding jobs, do not have time for ‘‘declaring shared understanding and shared goals.’’ They also highlight the different organization cultures that are brought together in collaborative networks. They mention potential conflicts with the public who seek to have an impact on network decisions. Rhodes and Murray present a six-part framework for understanding complex adaptive systems. The six parts are system scope or arena, system outcomes, system rules, agents and their decision-making behavior, decision factors that affect the behavior of agents, and the processes of the system that will be affected by initial conditions, path-dependencies, and bifurcation points. Conflict can arise in any one of these areas, but the last area—process—is a pivot point for conflict management. Rhodes and Murray explain: International Public Management Journal

Assessing and improving conflict resolution in multiparty environmental negotiations

After reviewing the logic and basics of Environmental Conflict Resolution (ECR), this article analyzes the praise for and criticisms of ECR. This article acknowledges the initial successes in the 1970s and 1980s that led to a major period of expansion for ECR, and continues today, but argues that it must do a better job of proving itself. That is, proponents must conduct more rigorous assessments of its utility under different conditions and invest in data collection that goes far beyond present efforts. The article concludes by reviewing the challenges and opportunities facing ECR in the twenty-first century. Singled out for attention is the need for scholars and practitioners to understand ECR interventions as targeted at aggregate rather than dyadic relationships, as complex systems embedded in even larger complex systems, as time-extended phenomena, and as ripe for evaluation for their impact on substantive environmental outcomes.

From Postal to Peaceful: Dispute Systems Design in the USPS REDRESS® Program

This article explores the concept of dispute systems design for workplace disputes, focusing particularly on the first two stages: organizational diagnosis and design. It argues that dispute systems should be designed in light of the conflict-related motivations and behaviors of personnel under existing conditions, as well as the likely consequences of each design choice on their future motivations and behaviors, including incentives to participate in the new system.These assertions are illustrated with an in-depth case study of Resolve Employment Disputes, Reach Equitable Solutions Swiftly (REDRESS®), the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) employment mediation program. The case study shows that the organizational diagnosis stage was critical to the successful design of the USPS program in that it provided important information about the dispute behaviors of personnel in the existing system. In turn, this information helped the USPS understand how various design choices would affect individual incentives to participate the future REDRESS® system.

TRANSFORMATIVE MEDIATION AT WORK

The United States Postal Services (USPS) has implemented a nation-wide mediation program called REDRESS. The program uses the transformative model of mediation which prohibits the mediator from taking a directive or an evaluative approach in mediation, but instead requires that mediators seek to empower the parties and generate opportunities for recognition of each others’ perspectives. This study examines the perceptions of participants about procedural justice under the early implementation of the transformative mediation model by analyzing exit surveys. This study finds that a great majority of both employees and supervisors are satisfied with the mediation process and the mediators. This result holds even for employees whose disputes were not resolved at the mediation. In addition, this study finds that the mediation process and individual mediator performance are significant contributors to outcome satisfaction. Based on these results, this study concludes that the transformative model of mediation, which focuses not on resolving the immediate issue but on the empowerment and recognition of participants, is a promising alternative to traditional routes of dispute resolution in the public workplace.