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MANAGERIAL APPROACHES

THE CHOICE OF RECIPES

MANAGING EMPLOYEE RELATIONS

  • Employee Relations involves systems, ideas, policies, procedures and structures for managing potential or actual conflict.

  • Employee Relations strategy involves those ways of acting, as above, whose aim is to minimize or contain the conflicts of interests which potentially inhibit organizational effectiveness

Employee relations-post war context

  • Collectivised workplaces
  • Aspiring workers
  • Growing Trade Unions
  • State owned industries and nationalisation
  • Conduct of employee relations through trade union recognition and collective bargaining
  • Political orientation towards corporatism
  • Therefore managing with trade unions (Williams, 2017: 144)

MANAGERIAL control of the labour process

  • Taylorism & control: scientific management

Manual and mental work – division of labour

  • Braverman and the deskilling thesis
  • Fordist production processes – what kind of control?
  • The role of technology/ task fragmentation/short task cycle times
  • Command and control approaches involving a focus on strict regimes and punitive practices

The limits of fordist control

  • Associated with mass production more than service, retail or knowledge economies
  • Efficiency to do with economies of scale and low unit costs
  • The challenge of globalisation
  • Neo-fordism – workers become flexible with multiple skills and multiple tasks
  • Post-fordism – flexible multi-skilled workers engaged in teamwork production processes in flat hierarchies (flexible specialization), emphasis on ‘quality’ and ‘commitment’
  • Therefore ‘command and control’ has limits

MANAGERIAL APPROACHES

  • Collectivism………………Individualism
  • Collective determination of pay and conditions, to individualistic approaches to performance management

  • Pluralism…………………….Unitarism
  • Representation of different interests, to the articulation of all interest through the business goals and strategy

Pluralism and Unitarism

Pluralism

  • Collectivism
  • Trade Union recognition
  • Collective bargaining
  • A degree of power-sharing
  • Collective ‘indirect’ representation, participation and involvement
  • Focus on pay and conditions
  • Trade unions a legitimate partner at local and national levels
  • Inclusion in policy making frameworks
  • Sympathetic legislation for TU

Unitarism

  • Individualism
  • Managing without unions
  • Decisions by managerial prerogative (HRM practices)
  • Management as the single source of authority
  • ‘direct’ forms of participation and involvement
  • Focus on task improvement
  • Trade unions not seen as legitimate
  • Absent in policy making frameworks
  • Anti- Trade union legislation and ideology

STYLES OF MANAGING EMPLOYEE RELATIONS
(Farnham and Pimlott)

  • Participative - highly pluralistic (collective) and developed systems for employee involvement – more democratic systems (eg NHS)

  • Paternalistic - somewhat pluralistic (but not collective) but low on employee involvement and power sharing (eg Quaker companies Rowntrees, Reckitts)

  • Consultative - highly unitarist (individualistic)in orientation but has systems of employee involvement perhaps at a low level (M & S; John Lewis)

  • Authoritarian - highly unitarist (individualistic) and no systems for employee involvement (eg Sports Direct)


(Sisson 1989, Storey &Sisson 1993, 2001)
Developments in Management Style

  • TRADITIONAL - Labour viewed as a factor of production, unions opposed

  • CONSTITUTIONAL - Similar to ‘traditional’ especially for unskilled labour but unions recognised and tolerated, management prerogatives defended through collective agreements

  • CONSULTATIVE - similar to ‘sophisticated human relations’ except unions are recognised. Attempts to work constructively with them

  • SOPHISTICATED HUMAN RELATIONS - Core workers well rewarded, emphsis on flexible reward structures, communication strategies etc, undermines the need for unionisation?

The contemporary context

  • Fall in influence and incidence of TUs (even so there were 3,000 recognition agreements between 2000-2010 Williams 2017:151)
  • Rise of sectors without collectivised traditions of conflict resolution and decision-making
  • Sophisticated HRM and employment relations – shift from ‘compliance to commitment’

THE MANAGERIAL AGENDA

  • Move towards ‘Integrationist’ Management Strategies
  • Began with Peters & Waterman and the ‘excellence’ movement in the early 1980s
  • Became a popular and dominant strategy for management of employee relations
  • Emphasis on ‘Top Down’ Strategy
  • Unitary management ideology
  • Management of corporate culture
  • The ‘hearts and minds’ approach
  • Emphasis on communication

THE MANAGERIAL AGENDA

  • Trade Unions either marginalised or embraced into ‘Partners in Change’ strategies
  • Stronger emphasis on ‘Employee Development’ strategies
  • ‘Investers in People’
  • ‘The Learning Organisation’
  • Customer and Quality Focus

STRATEGIES FOR ORGANISATIONAL INTEGRATION

  • Create and communicate the organisation’s mission
  • Establish ‘core values’ and promote essential behaviours
  • Promote the concept of ‘common purose’
  • Emphasise the need for unity by focussing on external threats eg competitors, customer requirements, funding sources etc
  • Reinforce desired ‘culture’ through strong leadership and through human resource strategy

EMPLOYEE RELATIONS AND STRATEGIC HRM

  • NUMERICAL FLEXIBILITY
  • Human Resource Planning
  • FUNCTIONAL FLEXIBILITY
  • skill flexibility, perfomance management, employee development
  • FINANCIAL FLEXIBLITY
  • core and periphery HR planning, performance related pay
  • CORE AND PERIPHERY
  • ‘THE FLEXIBLE FIRM’
  • SYSTEMS OF REPRESENTATION
  • ORGANISATIONAL STYLE AND CULTURE

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT AND EMPLOYEE RELATIONS

  • ‘HARD’ HRM - Employees as ‘overheads’ (costs to be minimised)
  • Numerical flexibility
  • Financial flexibility
  • ‘SOFT’ HRM - Employees as ‘assets’ (assets to be developed)
  • Functional flexibility
  • Financial flexibility

Reading: core texts (see module handbook on canvas)

  • Williams S (2017) ch 5 -7 Introducing Employment Relations
  • Dibben et al (2011) Employment Relations ch 4