Restorative Justice Approaches in the Workplace: A Systematic Review Protocol

Restorative justice (RJ) is an approach to justice that aims to address unmet needs in traditional retributive justice processes. After a harmful event, needs can arise from the person harmed, the responsible person, and the community. The development of RJ in recent decades has focused on criminal and school contexts. However, other applications have emerged, albeit to a lesser extent, in areas such as socio-environmental contexts, social assistance, and organizational settings, revealing the potential of RJ approaches in these settings. Conflicts and harm also occur in workplace settings, which makes it possible to study the application of RJ in that context. Some studies have addressed this issue, but there is a lack of a systematic review that synthesizes the knowledge, presents the evidence, and provides an overview of the field. This systematic review, therefore, has the following objective: to synthesize RJ approaches with internal participants in the workplace. Secondly, it is hoped that this discussion will highlight the gaps in the field, generating avenues for research, policy, and practice. In this protocol, we present a plan for the systematic review on this topic. The method focuses on synthesis and thematic analysis. Two researchers will refine the database results against the eligibility criteria. We hope to include relevant studies on the topic. This study contributes to the development of research, providing results that offer insight into the current state of the scientific field in this domain.