CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

11. ORGANIZATIONAL DISPUTE RESOLUTION SYSTEMS 345
or employee usage. Yet greater attention to how the adoption of an ODR
system within a firm links to employee usage would be informative. Similarly,
future research could examine ODR system effectiveness at multiple
levels of analyses (e.g., for the firm, work group, or individual). This would
be particularly enlightening in helping to resolve the somewhat separate
research streams that have shown positive outcomes for firms adopting
ODR systems (e.g., lower quit rates) but negative consequences for individuals
utilizing such systems (e.g., higher turnover). Such research would
require comparing across organizations but also taking into account the
individual processes involved in using ODR systems.
The tendency for prior ODR research to focus on either micro issues
or macro issues, in large parts, has been due to the tendency for researchers
in specific disciplines to approach ODR from differing perspectives
with different research questions. That is, I/O psychologists tend to be
interested in individuals or groups of individuals while economists and
industrial relations scholars tend to focus on the firm and/or bargaining
unit. We would hope researchers continue to look to and draw from disciplines
outside of their own to understand ODR systems. Interdisciplinary
approaches to research are most likely to lead to a fuller understanding
of the practice and effectiveness of ODR systems and provide the greatest
insight on the implications for workers, organizations, and public policy.
There have also been practical considerations contributing to the
micro–macro disconnect. When focused on the individual level of analysis,
researchers can easily gain access to many individuals within one
organization, but not across more than one organization. When organizational-level
research is designed, researchers tend to focus on archival
firm data (e.g., quit rates and grievance rates) and/or find it easier to
identify one or a small number of respondents to report on the organization’s
practices and outcomes. In addition to the access issue, multilevel
research in the past has been limited by the statistical techniques available
to researchers. However, recent developments in this area are likely
to enable future research to better assess multilevel issues. For instance,
more complex statistical techniques, such as repeated-measures regression
and hierarchical linear modeling (cf., Hofmann, 1997; Koslowski &
Klein, 2000), are increasing in use. These techniques enable researchers
simultaneously to tease out individual-, group-, and organizational-level
effects. From a design standpoint, firms may be increasingly amenable
to conducting research across sites in order to gain an understanding of
the determinants of high versus low performing units. Focusing on the
establishment level (cf. Batt et al., 2002) and individuals within a firm’s
various establishments is perhaps the most feasible and useful avenue to
bridge the micro-macro gulf. We expect that as more multilevel data sets
become available and researchers become well versed in multilevel statistical
techniques, we will see more cross-level research.
In the past few decades, we have witnessed an evolution of ODR systems
in both practice and theory. Though recent research has contributed