Peer Review Procedures: Employee Involvement in Dispute Resolution

Peer review procedures provide a mechanism for incorporating employee involvement into nonunion dispute resolution procedures in the workplace. Under peer review procedures, fellow employees who are peers of the grievant sit on a panel that hears and decides the employee's grievance. The intended effect is to increase employee trust in and use of dispute resolution procedures by providing a final decision-maker that is viewed as more independent of management and more favorable to the employee perspective in disputes. From a legal perspective peer review procedures are useful because they can be structured to avoid violating the limitations on nonunion employee representation plans contained in section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act. This paper investigates the implications for organizations of adoption of peer review procedures. Case study and survey evidence provides support for the effect of peer review on increasing employee use of dispute resolution procedures. In a survey of 203 establishments in the telecommunications industry, employees were over twice as likely to appeal disciplinary decisions through nonunion dispute resolution procedures where those procedures included peer review, though the rate of usage of peer review procedures was under half that for grievance-arbitration procedures in unionized establishments. Both case study and survey evidence also supports a linkage between peer review and the use of self-managed teams in the workplace. The average percentage of workers organized into self-managed teams was over twice as high in establishments with peer review as in either other nonunion establishments or unionized establishments.