Swanage Community Hospital

In the workplace, employees are under contract to obey the rules of the organisation. Eruptions of conflict are often regarded as inconvenient aberrations in normal working relationships. Senior management may not deem conflict management a priority or they may have little time to spare for it and instead maintain a focus on performance indicators that do not embrace dealing with conflict (Acas 2014). As a fallback, in compensation for a shortage of conflict management skills within management, mediation at worst may transfer responsibility for conflict from organisational causes, such as working pressures, to the individual, thus ‘reinterpreting unfair treatment as an interpersonal issue’ (Acas 2014, p. 9). Dolder warns of the risk that mediators who drive through compromises between parties may become ‘dealmakers protected by a cloak of confidentiality’ (Dolder 2004, p. 329). This pattern of the misapplication of mediation in the workplace could lead to a colonisation of mediation by the organisation that translates a benign project into a merely instrumental one. Whilst it can bring some benefits to participants, it may be primarily deployed in pursuit of organisational efficiency. The lasting effect could be to cover over deeper-rooted organisational problems of poor management practice in the widest sense. The mediation role-play material below will lend practical evidence to this theoretical analysis of the organisational colonisation of mediation. It will show how the facilitative model of mediation is highly susceptible to becoming an instrumental function, in no small part because mediators may lack a clear awareness of the power they have to influence parties in the determination of outcomes.