Procedural Justice and Conflict Management at School

Abstract

In this research, we explored the contributions of perceived procedural justice (PPJ) to the conflict management behaviors of adolescents when they experience conflict with their teachers.We tested an extensive model to determine how PPJ contributes to conflict management. We also extended research on PPJ to examine its impact on adolescents. Our results, acquired from a large and diverse sample of 256 high school students, indicate that PPJ had an impact on adolescents' approach to managing conflicts with their teachers. Students who perceived that their teachers' decision processes were just were less dominating and more avoiding, obliging, and compromising. In addition, we found that students' perceptions about the legitimacy of their teachers' authority mediated the relationships between PPJ and conflict management style. This study contributes to the rather scarce research on PPJ's role in conflict management and should be useful for educators searching for constructive, relationship-based tools for conflict management.Key words: conflict resolution,perceived procedural justice,conflict management styles, dual-concern model, teacher legitimacy, student-teacher conflict.Noa Nelson is a lecturer at the Program for Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and at the department for behavioral sciences at Peres Academic Center in Rehovot, Israel. Her e-mail address is noanel@gmail.com.Dikla Shechter is a high-tech project manager and a graduate of the doctoral program at the Program for Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University. Her e-mail address is dikla.shechter@gmail.com.Rachel Ben-Ari is a professor at the psychology department and at the Program for Conflict Management and Negotiation at Bar-Ilan University. Her e-mail address is benarir@mail.biu.ac.il. IntroductionConflict occurs when parties have opposing goals and perceive each other as obstacles to achieving them (Putnam and Poole 1987). Conflict researchers often evaluate conflict management responses by employing a dualconcern model (Thomas 1976; Rahim and Bonoma 1979;Pruitt 1981;Rahim 1983Rahim , 2001) that combines two independent concerns -concern for self and concern for the other party -to create five distinct conflict management styles. A person who reports high concern for himself or herself and low concern for others will fall into the dominating (competitive) category. At the other end, those who fall into the obliging category report low concern for themselves and high concern for others. Having moderate concern for both oneself and others are characteristics of those in the compromising category. High concern for both is characteristic of those in the integrating category. Finally, those who report low concern for both the interests of themselves and others fall into the avoiding category (Rahim 1983).Ali Kazemi (2007) characterized three orientations correlated with moderate to high levels of concern for the other person -compromising, integrating, and obliging -as collaborative, be...

Re-conceptualizing classroom assessment fairness: A systematic meta-ethnography of assessment literature and beyond

“…Fairness has consistently been emphasized in classroom assessment (CA) standards and practices as an essential quality and a significant dimension of teachers' assessment literacy (DeLuca, 2012;DeLuca, LaPointe-McEwan, & Luhanga, 2016;Xu & Brown, 2016). Empirical studies have demonstrated that teachers' fairness practices are associated with positive learning effects for students such as cognitive learning (Holmgren & Bolkan, 2014;Molinari, Speltini, & Passini, 2013), instructor satisfaction (Wendorf & Alexander, 2005), self-efficacy (Vallade, Martin, & Weber, 2014), legitimation of teacher and school authority (Gouveia-Pereira, Vala, Palmonari, & Rubini, 2003;Nelson, Shechter, & Ben-Ari, 2014), political trust (Abdelzadeh, Zetterberg, & Ekman, 2015), and positive evaluation of teacher expertise (Cronen & Fuller, 1976;Gotlieb, 2009;Rodabaugh & Kravitz, 1994). In contrast, perceived unfair behavior is associated with outcomes such as aggression and hostility (Horan, Chory, Carton, Miller, & Raposo, 2013;Uludag, 2014), truancy (Ishak & Fin, 2013), headache (Lenzi et al, 2013), and cheating (Lemons, Martin, & Seaton, 2011).…”

The Effects of Perceived Procedural Justice on Conflict Management between Spouses, and the Mediating Role of Dyadic Adjustment

“…Reliabilities (measured by Cronbach's alpha) of the questionnaires were as follow: neutrality (e.g., “my spouse explains his/her decisions to me”) yielded alpha = 0.79; trust (e.g., “my spouse is thoughtful of my needs”) yielded alpha = 0.88; standing (e.g., “even when my spouse is angry, she treats me respectfully”) yielded alpha = 0.81; and voice (e.g., “my spouse makes a point of hearing my opinion before making important decisions”) yielded alpha = 0.79. The correlations among PPJ's elements in the current study were high ( r = 0.55–0.76) and, because previous studies used an average total PPJ score (Tyler, Degoey, and Smith ; Tyler ; Nelson et al ), we also computed a PPJ score based on the entire set (alpha = 0.93).…”

“…We note that we tested how each scenario affected the perceptions of all four dimensions of PPJ. We did this because PPJ dimensions had previously been highly correlated (former studies also averaged them into a unified PPJ score: Tyler ; Nelson et al ).…”

“…To assess perceived levels of procedural justice in the scenarios (manipulation check) we used a set of four sub‐questionnaires (five to eight items each), representing the dimensions of PPJ identified above (neutrality, trust, standing, and voice). We based them on the questionnaires used in a study that examined high school students’ perceptions of their teachers’ procedural justice conducted by Noa Nelson, Dikla Shechter, and Rachel Ben‐ari (), which were Hebrew versions based on questionnaires from two previous studies (Tyler ; Tyler and Blader ). We changed the wording of the items to apply them to a spousal relationship and to the scenarios that our participants had read.…”

“…Greg Berman and Emily Gold () recommended that judges embrace PPJ principles to enhance criminal court communication. We recently studied the effects of PPJ on high school students during conflict with their teachers and found that PPJ correlated to fewer dominating and more obliging, compromising, and avoiding behaviors (Nelson et al ). While the above findings concern organizational settings, Mark R. Fondacaro, Shelly L. Jackson, and Jennifer Luescher () studied procedural justice in families, as perceived by adolescents, and found that it was inversely correlated with levels of conflict in the family…”