|
Article Excerpt
The number and costs of employment discrimination legal claims have skyrocketed in the last 20 years (e.g., Goldman, 2001). These claims can have an enormous impact on both the employee (e.g., financial, emotional/motivational, work/family issues) and the organization (e.g., financial, poor climate (Smither et al., 1993)). For instance, in 2006 there were approximately 76,000 charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, 2007) and such charges can be quite costly to the organization in terms of legal fees, lawsuits, reputation, and costs associated with correcting an illegal organizational policy or practice. For example, Texaco, which was found guilty in a racial discrimination lawsuit, paid $176 million in a settlement and then spent millions more creating and implementing a plan to diversify their workforce (Walsh, 1996). It is not surprising then, that this topic has increasingly attracted the attention of organizational researchers (e.g., Bauer et al., 2001; Bies and Tyler, 1993; Goldman, 2001; Groth et al., 2002; Wallace et al., 2006).
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Although this area of investigation has blossomed recently, the vast majority of such studies rely on litigation intentions (e.g., Bies and Tyler, 1993; Lind et al., 2000; Wallace et al., 2006) or self-reported complaints to authorities such as the EEOC (Goldman, 2001, 2003; Lind et al., 2000) as the primary criterion. However, intentions do not always lead to intended behaviors (e.g., Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) and studies relying on litigation intentions as the criterion may not have painted a very clear picture of the litigation process. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies have been based at the individual level of analysis and this area of research can benefit from studying such variables at the higher organizational levels of analysis due to the strong social aspect of litigation (Goldman, 2001). More specifically, because employee-initiated litigation rests heavily on the social aspects of the work unit, a climate of fairness might buffer against employee discrimination claims, leading to fewer lawsuits. Thus, the primary objective of the present study was to investigate the relationship between rates of employee discrimination claims and rates of actual lawsuits filed. Furthermore, we believe that this relationship can be explained by perceptions of organizational procedures in place to handle formal discrimination claims and the climate that such procedures create (i.e., procedural justice climate). Figure I displays our theoretical model.
Employee-initiated Litigation
One of the criticisms (e.g., Goldman et al., 2004) of litigation research is the reliance on intentions to file a legal claim instead of actual lawsuits as a criterion. Furthermore, rather than explaining the process leading to employee-initiated litigation, the majority of studies have relied on simply predicting litigation intentions. This is problematic because intentions do not always lead to litigation and it is important to investigate why and when complaints do lead to lawsuits. In addition, legal claiming follows a process through a series of decision rules from the initial perceptions of rights violations to actually filing the lawsuit (Goldman, 2001). This process is largely dependent on the social context within which the person perceives the injustice. That is, the decision to file suit against an employer is not solely determined by the perceiver, but rather is determined in conjunction with input from co-workers, supervisors, and other organizational members as well as family members and friends outside of the workplace. For instance, within the transformational perspective of disputing (Felstiner et al., 1980-1981), Goldman et al. (2004) specified a model of legal claiming in which self-categorization theory, attribution theory, justice theory, and social information processing theory explain various steps of the legal claiming process. Following this model, claiming, (1) in which a person seeks a remedy to the problem within the organization, leads to disputing, in which a person seeks a remedy outside the organization, only when an intra-organizational remedy is not identified or is unacceptable (via claiming). Goldman et al. (2004) contend that this could be attributable, at least partially, to the violation of procedural fairness norms, which operate within a social context (cf. Salancik and Pfeffer, 1978) and, in turn, push the employee to file suit.
Theoretical models posit (e.g., Goldman et al., 2004) and empirical research indicates (e.g., Goldman, 2003; Lind et al., 2000; Wallace et al., 2006) that justice perceptions predict intentions. For example, Bies and Tyler (1993), Goldman (2003), and Lind et al. (2000) provided empirical evidence that procedural justice was a significant predictor of litigation intentions. In addition, Goldman (2001) reported that distributive and procedural justice were significant predictors of written and verbal complaints to the EEOC, but did not examine lawsuits filed. In a follow-up study, Goldman et al. (2004) found that procedural justice was more important than distributive justice for a majority of respondents when deciding whether to file suit. Furthermore, Wallace et al. (2006) found that procedural justice moderated the relationship between illegal selection procedures and litigation intentions in such a manner that when procedural justice was high, litigation intentions were low, regardless of the legality of the selection procedure.
Although these studies have furthered our understanding of the litigation process, we believe that justice theory also can be used to explain the relationship between formal intra-organizational employee discrimination claims (i.e., claiming) and actual litigation (i.e., disputing) via the social mechanisms...
|
