Towards an understanding of the role of anticipatory justice in the employment dispute-resolution process An investigation of EEOC-sponsored mediation

Аннотация

Purpose – The paper aims to investigate why organizations often opt to reject Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)-sponsored mediation of employment disputes (in contrast to employees who tend to readily agree to it). It is guided by recent research associated with Shapiro and Kirkman’s (1999, 2001) theory of “anticipatory justice”, whereby (in)justice is anticipated, or expected, when people think about an event they have not yet experienced whose likely fairness they are questioning. In contrast, “organizational justice” reflects people’s retrospective assessments of how fair they have been treated to date. Design/methodology/approach – The paper relied upon data made available by the mediation program administered by the US EEOC. The EEOC provided the names and contact information for theofficially designated EEOC contacts for each dispute. The authors distributed surveys to each of these organizational representatives and received completed surveys from 492 organizations (a response rate of 85.8 per cent).