Organizational Justice and Dispute Resolution: A Six-Factor Model for Workplace Mediation

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between organizational justice and workplace mediation. Despite the value of using organizational justice to assess the perceived fairness of workplace mediation, there may be some problems with the wholesale application of the traditional four-factor model of organizational justice to such processes. The most obvious problem is the application of a model designed to assess justice perception in a two-way supervisor-subordinate relationship (as is the case in most organizational justice research) to a mediation process where there are multiple and divergent directions of interaction and reduced power imbalances. This study proposes and tests a six-factor model of organizational justice for application to workplace mediation. It finds that a six-factor model provides a significantly better fit for workplace mediation than the traditional four-factor model. This result has implications for both the theory and practice behind workplace mediation.