A Transformational Model of Legal-Claiming

Abstract

Few areas of conflict in organizations are as potentially disruptive and costly as legal claims by employees. Approximately 21,000 lawsuits involving employment issues were filed in federal courts alone during 2000 (USC, 2001). Of these, approximately 70% involved employment discrimination lawsuits (SHRM, 2000). Even this number represents the tip of a vaster iceberg. Legal-claiming represents a much broader series of actions than court appearances. For example, discrimination lawsuits, of which there were 364 in 2002 (EEOC, 2003), do not represent the total number of discrimination charges filed. Discrimination charges, of which there were 84,442 in 2002, involve the formal written request to a government entity for intervention. For purposes of this article, we use the definition of legal-claim given by Goldman (2003) to define discrimination charges--a complaint by an aggrieved employee to a governmental entity for the purpose of seeking a remedy provided by law. Researchers have only recently begun to investigate legal-claiming behavior (e.g., Goldman, 2001; Lind et al., 2000; Groth et al., 2002). Much of this research focuses on organizational justice as a predictor of legal-claiming (Goldman, 2001; Lind et al., 2000). In addition to organizational justice, other theories (e.g., attribution theory, Groth et al., 2002; social information processing theory, Goldman, 2001) also have been offered as alternatives to explain legal-claiming. Despite the success of these models in describing specific aspects of legal-claiming, current research is hampered by the prevailing paradigm that views legal-claiming as a static phenomenon, with little emphasis on how these disputes develop over time (for an exception, see Lind et al., 2000). A dynamic perspective suggests that, among other things, the numerous theories proposed as alternatives to explain legal-claiming are, in fact, not competitive alternatives but appropriate explanations for specific temporal periods in an extended and unfolding conflict process. In the present article we propose a model of legal-claiming that recognizes the dynamic quality of the conflict leading up to the legal-claim. This perspective focuses on how conflicts change over time and how various theories of organizational behavior may explain events at different temporal stages leading up to legal-claiming. We frame these stages using the transformational perspective of disputing proposed by Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat (1980-1981). The transformational perspective focuses on the changing nature of disputes over time and, in particular, argues that disputes--including legal claims--go through three stages (which Felstiner et al. label naming, blaming, and claiming) that lead to the final stage, disputing. The nature of the conflict changes as it progresses between each stage, and we focus on the transformations between each of Felstiner et al.'s dispute process stages. This article focuses on discrimination claims since they represent the largest category of legal-claims filed by employees against employing organizations (Goldman, 2003). For organizations, responding to these employment discrimination charges is costly, time-consuming, and disruptive, regardless of the litigation outcome. Furthermore, the problems associated with the filing of discrimination charges may erode organizational commitment and job satisfaction (Bies and Tyler, 1993) and harm the organization's reputation (Walsh, 1997). Additionally, outcomes resulting from discrimination claims may encourage government interference in the structuring of business practices. For example, in 1997, Texaco announced a $176 million settlement in a race discrimination lawsuit, including a detailed plan to diversify the workforce, that was in response to a consumer boycott and plans for a stock divestiture (Washington Post, Dec. 19, 1996). Finally, there are ethical concerns: discrimination violates prevailing moral and ethical standards. …

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.