COMPARING 3 PROCESSES UNDERLYING JUDGMENTS OF PROCEDURAL JUSTICE - A FIELD-STUDY OF MEDIATION AND ARBITRATION

A natural setting in which 158 coal miners who had filed grievances we re assigned to either mediation or arbitration was used to test a mode l of 3 mediating processes underlying judgments of procedural justice: instrumental, noninstrumental, and procedural enactment. The generali ty of these processes was tested across procedures varying objectively in the degree of disputants' outcome control, across contexts in whic h disputes rather than decisions were resolved, and across situations in which the grievance was won, lost, or compromised as a result of th e dispute resolution procedure. All 3 processes consistently accounted for judgments of procedural justice in all but 1 of these circumstanc es (instrumental processes did not account for procedural justice when grievants won). Perceptions of the 3rd party's enactment of the proce dure emerged in this study as a key influence (as a moderator and medi ator) of procedural justice judgments. Implications for the theory of procedural justice and the design of dispute resolution procedures are discussed.