Procedural justice as a critical element in managing disputes

If an over whelming number of sport disputes going to arbitration are found in favor of the sport organization why do athletes keep taking their grievances as far as they can? Statistics suggest sport organizations have largely been fair at law in how they have dealt with issues but complainants nonetheless do not feel they had been treated fairly (ADRSportRED Jurisprudential Database, 2007). The answer may be that complainants don't feel as though they have been treated fairly through out the organization's dispute resolution process. Procedural justice refers peoples ' perceptions of fairness. It is well established that the perception of justice is an important factor in assessing the effectiveness of dispute resolution systems (Howeison, 2005). Perceptions of fairness have been shown to have strong effects on attitudes about institutions and the authorities representing them. High levels of perceptions of fairness dramatically affect factors such as trust, degree of citizenship and compliance with sanctions (Konovsky, 2000). Such levels have also been shown to mitigate the effects of a negative outcome, that is, the more severe the negative outcome of a decision, the more important the perception of procedural justice. Conversely, good outcomes can mitigate the negative effects of low, or poor, perceptions of procedural justice (Tyler & Lind, 2000). Such evidence points to the importance of incorporating aspects of procedural justice as legitimate elements of any dispute resolution process. That said, by and large, research into systems of dispute resolution within sport has focused on the structural elements of such systems. Five structural elements have received particular attention in the sport literature: procedural element