How can organizational leaders help to create healthy, conflict-friendly workplaces? Bernard Mayer, a Queen’s IRC Facilitator who is an international expert in conflict resolution and mediation, shares insights for managers in the following Q & A. What is a ‘conflict-friendly’ environment? The key here is to acknowledge that organizations, communities and relationships need conflict. It …
An expert in managing conflict, Dr. John S. Andrew teaches negotiation at Queen’s School of Urban and Regional Planning; provides independent facilitation and mediation services to parties involved inland use, environmental, and transportation disputes; and leads executive seminars on strategic consensus-building in corporate real estate. Dr. Andrew spoke with us about what makes a good …
The revival of grievance mediation can be traced to an experiment in mediating workplace disputes in the coal industry of the United States in 1980, which resulted in a very high success rate of 80 to 90 percent. The decades that followed, researchers comparing the effectiveness of grievance mediation and arbitration concluded that grievance mediation is a faster process with lower costs that can produce a ‘win-win’ outcome and a positive long-term impact on the relationship between the parties.
Drawing on detailed interviews with experienced med-arbiters from the Grievance Settlement Board, this study looks at the advantages of “med-arb”, in which parties attempt to reach voluntary agreements before proceeding to arbitration.
Dispute resolution is an integral part of management. Almost seventy-five percent of job-related stress is generated by internal disputes, and more than eighty-five percent of people leaving their jobs do so because of some perceived internal conflict.
The rise of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) to provide more efficient and less expensive methods of settling disputes, and the advantages and requirements for the success of ADR and mediation, are covered in this paper.
Where once Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) referred to an alternative to the courts, ADR in the field of labour relations is increasingly being referred to as an alternative to arbitration. The objectives of ADR and the newly emerging Internal Dispute Resolution (IDR) are to settle disputes prior to having to go to binding arbitration over which the parties have little control. ADR and IDR are recognized as giving the parties greater direct voice in fashioning remedies and more timely settlements.
Many different forms of impasse procedure exist to facilitate arrival at an agreement once the parties, engaged in negotiations, reach an impasse. The more traditional approaches have tended to be the use of mediation (or conciliation), arbitration and strike/lockout.
This paper analyzes the methods by which settlements were arrived at in more than 1400 Ontario collective agreements during the years 1970-1973 and discusses some of the implications of these patterns. The analysis is based on information published jointly by the Federal and Ontario Departments of Labour, covering settlements involving more than 250 employees in industries other than construction.