Mediators with Italian Characteristics. Styles, Conflict Attitudes and Settlement Rates

We analyzed a questionnaire sent to 200 mediators registered with the mediation providersof the Italian Chambers of Commerce. We sought to investigate three areas relevant to the professionalism and attitudes of the mediators: the style of mediation; the personal attitude towards the conflict; effectiveness in leading the parties to a negotiated agreement in mediation. To determine the stylistic orientation of the mediator, we tried to find out what types of behavior by respondents corresponded to his/her own style as a mediator, and the style that ideally they believed the most correct. The distribution of the styles of conflict management is homogenous even compared the experience of mediation and the number of mediation agreements.

We then probed the relationship between the variables related to characteristics of respondents through correlation analysis. There were no significant correlations between the style of mediation and the attitude of the respondents to the conflict. A second significant result is that individuals with economic education have a higher rate of agreements with respect to the lawyers. Although not by a significant difference due to the relatively small sample, respondents with a post-graduate training in economics or accounting, report rates of agreement significantly higher than those who reported a background in law, in ADR, in psychology or who do not report a post-graduate training. Finally, the anova test on the rate of mediation agreements shows a significant difference between men and women. The Italian model is legalistic, but its practical results seems not so distant from the results obtained in voluntary models. It seems that the style of the mediator might be of some use as a paradigm of orientation with respect to each phase of the process, but has no sufficient predictive value to be confirmed as a key to the functioning of the mediation