Conflict Resolution and Organizational Justice in the Workplace --Evidence-Based Research.

• Author: McCabe, Douglas M.

INTRODUCTION

This paper is a call for the management of nonunion organizations to recognize the importance, and even the necessity, of maximizing what academia calls "employee voice." Giving more than lip-service to the claim that employees are "our most important asset" will strengthen the management of these organizations.

The commonly accepted definition of employee voice has two aspects. The first, historically, is employees' raising of personal complaints in a work-related context, especially when these complaints are serious enough in the employee's opinion to require presentation of a formal grievance. The second aspect is the participation of employees in management's decision-making process, often referred to as "participative management." This allows experienced employees to contribute their know-how and creative ideas to the improvement of the workplace (Grenig, 2016).

CONFLICT RESOLUTION METHODS

Without an appeal mechanism, employees with grievances have no specific avenue for raising complaints. This axiomatic statement presents a self-evident truth and has provided a firm foundation for this researcher for his own in-company and field research investigations.

Consideration of that statement instantly warns management that such an employee is disgruntled, with potentially dangerous consequences for employer-employee relations. Such disgruntlement should lead management to expect the employee to feel uneasy at work, to lose enthusiasm, to work inefficiently, to possibly seek other employment, and, in more serious situations, to infect other employees' morale or even perform an act of sabotage.

This leads in turn to the conclusion that management needs a formal grievance appeal system and that it must be one with such patent reasonableness and fairness that employees will feel confident of receiving justice when they present formal grievances.

While this study will provide support for that conclusion, its main thrust will be to furnish management with practical information about policies and implementing procedures with which nonunion organizations have had experience.

The national economy is one vast experimental laboratory in which principles and practices are developed for providing the public with good products and services at reasonable prices. This laboratory has two sets of researchers who work independently: those who identify themselves as academic researchers and the business executives and managers who direct the...