Disputants' Perceptions of Interactional Justice : Comparing How Employees and Supervisors Interact in Mediation

This paper examines how a disputant's role in a conflict impacts the disputant's perceptions of and satisfaction with transformative mediation. Specifically, it examines evidence of disputants' interactions in the context of transformative mediation for employees and supervisors at the United States Postal Service (USPS). The paper finds that managers/supervisors are more likely than employees to report that they learned something new about the other party, acknowledged the other party's point of view or apologized to the other person. There is also evidence for a modest amount of recognition from both employees and supervisors of the acknowledging, learning and apologizing of the other party. Both employees and supervisors report high rates of settlement when they report high levels of interactional justice in the transformative mediation. This indicates that the quality of participants' interactions in mediation is related to the quality of the mediated outcome. It is also evident that a participant's role in mediation impacts his or her interactions with the other participant