Managerial Responsiveness to Union and Nonunion Worker Voice in Britain

Over the last two decades, there has been a switch in British workplaces away from union voice and representative worker voice more generally toward direct employee involvement and nonunion representative forms of voice. This article assesses the implications of this switch for the effectiveness of worker voice, as measured by employee perceptions of managerial responsiveness. In general, perceptions of managerial responsiveness are better among employees with nonunion voice than they are among employees with union voice.     

Industrial Relations Climate,Employee Voice and Managerial Attitudes to Unions: An Australian Study

This article examines how employee voice arrangements and managerial attitudes to unions shape employees' perceptions of the industrial relations climate, using data from the 2007 Australian Worker Representation and Participation Survey (AWRPS) of 1,022 employees. Controlling for a range of personal, job and workplace characteristics, regression analyses demonstrate that employees' perceptions of the industrial relations climate are more likely to be favourable if they have access to direct‐only voice arrangements. Where management is perceived by employees to oppose unions (in unionized workplaces), the industrial relations climate is more likely to be reported as poor. These findings have theoretical implications, and significant practical implications for employers, employees, unions and the government.     

Pro‐Social or Pro‐Management? A Critique of the Conception of Employee Voice as a Pro‐Social Behaviour within Organizational Behaviour

For many years, the employment relations (ER) literature took the perspective that employee voice via trade unions could channel discontent and reduce exit, thereby improving productivity. In organizational behaviour (OB) research voice has also emerged as an important concept, and a focus of this research has been to understand the antecedents of the decision of employees to engage or not engage in voice. In OB research, however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests. Rather, it is seen as an expression of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate information and ideas to management for the benefit of the organization. This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in particular highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro‐social behaviour. We argue that the OB conception of voice is at best partial because its definition of voice as an activity that benefits the organization leaves no room for considering voice as a means of challenging management, or indeed simply as being a vehicle for employee self‐determination.     

Discretion in Context: A Moderated Mediation Model of the Relationship between Discretion and Turnover Intentions

This paper examines the relationship between employee discretion and turnover intentions. We test the proposition that this relationship is mediated by employee stress and moderated by employee perceptions of staffing adequacy. We maintain that in assessing the potential effects of increased employee discretion, scholars must also examine the mechanisms through which these benefits are delivered, and the context in which it is provided. In an effort to study discretion in context, we develop and test a “moderated mediation” model in the healthcare setting. Our findings support the hypotheses that employee stress mediates the relationship between discretion and turnover intentions. In addition, employee perceptions of staffing adequacy are shown to moderate the relationship between employee discretion and stress.     

High Performance Work Practices and Employee Voice: A Comparison of Japanese and Korean Workers

Using a unique new cross‐national survey of Japanese and Korean workers, we report the first systematic evidence on the effects on employee voice of High Performance Work Practices (HPWPs) from the two economies that are noted for the wide use of HPWPs. We find for both nations that: (i) workers in firms with HPWPs aimed at creating opportunities for employees to get involved (such as shopfloor committees and small group activities) are indeed more likely to have stronger senses of influence and voice on shopfloor decision making than other workers; (ii) workers whose pay is tied to firm performance are more likely to have a stake in firm performance and hence demand such influence and voice; and (iii) consequently workers in firms with HPWPs are more likely to make frequent suggestions for productivity increase and quality improvement. As such, this paper contributes to a small yet growing new empirical literature that tries to understand the actual process and mechanism through which HPWPs lead to better enterprise performance.     

Management,Organizational Justice and Emotional Exhaustion among Chinese Migrant Workers: Evidence from two Manufacturing Firms

This article explores how Human Resource (HR) policies and practices influence employee perceptions of organizational justice, which in turn impacts employee emotions and feelings of emotional exhaustion. Using structural equation modelling and based on employee survey data drawn from two manufacturing organizations, we find that a strong HR system — perceived by workers as distinctive, attractive and consistently implemented — fosters perceptions of distributive, procedural and interactive justice. However, only distributive injustice leads to negative emotions and emotional exhaustion. This is explained by reference to the cultural and institutional context (China), status (migrant) and type of workers (semi‐skilled, manual) included in the study. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications that arise from these findings.     

Works Councils and Unionization: Lessons from South Korea

This study analyzes the impact of effective works councils and unions in large South Korean firms. Following a brief review of economic theory on works councils and the institutional environment of Korean industrial relations, we describe the unique data set used to analyze Korean firm-level labor relations and economic performance. The results of the multivariate analysis show that both effective works councils and unions enhance employee voice on several key personnel practices. In addition, the estimates show that unionization increases wages and reduces turnover, but effective works councils are associated with higher levels of employee satisfaction and somewhat higher productivity. These estimates are consistent with theoretical models that find that carefully designed works councils can enhance employee voice and may increase productivity.     

Union Participation, Job Satisfaction, and Employee Turnover: An Event-History Analysis of the Exit-Voice Hypothesis

This study examines the exit-voice hypothesis by applying event-history analysis to data from a sample of 674 unionized public school teachers from 405 schools. Union participation (i.e., voice) and job satisfaction had significant negative main effects on turnover. In contrast to the original formulation of the exit-voice hypothesis, a test for interaction revealed that union participation had significant negative effects on quit behavior for members displaying both low and high satisfaction.
  The existing conclusions regarding the role of unions in reducing employee quits by providing voice mechanisms implicitly assume that union members actually use these mechanisms. Mechanisms such as attending union meetings and serving on a committee provide opportunities for members to express how they feel about their wages and working conditions. In this article we examine the influences of union participation and job satisfaction on individuals' decisions to quit working for an organization using event-history analysis. Unlike existing research, the present study focuses on member participation in a range of union activities (i.e., voting in union elections, attending union meetings, serving in a union office or on a committee, and seeking assistance from the union) to analyze the effect of union voice on employee quits. ¹ We further investigate how union participation and job satisfaction may interact to influence employee turnover over time, controlling for demographic, job-related, environmental, and contextual variables across 405 research sites.     

感知的领导距离对员工建言行为的影响研究——心理安全感的中介作用

组织中的领导因素在促进员工建言的过程中发挥着重要的作用，但员工所感知到的领导距离对其建言行为有何影响？本文基于社会认知理论，并通过对160 名员工问卷调查数据的统计分析结果表明：员工感知的权力距离对促进性建言有显著的负向影响，而感知的社会距离对抑制性建言有显著的负向影响；心理安全感在感知的权力距离与促进性建言之间、感知的权力距离和抑制性建言之间有显著的中介效应。这一结论为促进和改进中国情境下的员工建言行为提供了一定的理论依据。     

Employee Representation and Consultative Voice in Multinational Companies Operating in Britain

Multinational companies (MNCs) from different countries of origin are widely held to have distinct preferences regarding the presence of employee representative structures and the form that employee 'voice' over management decisions takes. Such preferences are said to derive from the national models that prevail in the different countries of origin in which MNCs are based. Findings from a large-scale survey of the UK operations of MNCs indicate that country-of-origin influences on patterns of employee representation and emphasis on direct or indirect channels of employee 'voice' are attenuated by other factors, notably sector and method of growth. They also reveal significant recent innovation in representation and voice arrangements by this key group of employers.     

Leeway for the Loyal: A Model of Employee Discretion

This article examines the factors underlying task discretion from an economist's perspective. It argues that the key axis for understanding discretion is the trade‐off between the positive effects of discretion on potential output per employee and the negative effects of greater leeway on work effort. In empirical analysis using matched employer–employee data, it is shown that discretion is strongly affected by the level of employee commitment. In addition, discretion is generally greater in high‐skilled jobs, although not without exceptions, and lower where employees are under‐skilled. Homeworking and flexitime policies raise employee discretion. The impact of teamworking is mixed. In about half of cases team members do not jointly decide about work matters, and the net effect of teams on task discretion in these cases is negative. In other cases, where team members do decide matters jointly, the impact is found to be neutral according to employees' perceptions, or positive according to managers' perceptions. There are also significant and substantial unobserved establishment‐level factors which affect task discretion.     

Images of the Virtuous Employee in China's Transitional Economy

We examine contemporary images of employee virtue and managers' perceptions of actual employee conduct in Wuhan, Beijing and Xi'an, drawing on document analysis and structured interviews with 112 respondents in ten case study companies. The image promulgation strategies of the one joint venture enterprise and the two private enterprises in our sample entailed active avowal of tradition linked employee virtue, drawing on a mixture of Communist and Confucian moral imagery. In contrast, most of the seven state-owned or predominantly state invested enterprises had abandoned or marginalized traditional Communist imagery, none promoted Confucian imagery, and two emphasized alternative images of one-sided servility toward the customer. We infer, from managers' accounts, that the abandonment of tradition linked images by the state-owned sector was a tacit acknowledgment of prior covenant violation, and that outside the state-owned sector, tradition linked moral propaganda contributed to moral atmosphere only when part of a consistent high-commitment HRM strategy. In drawing out implications for theory and further research, we note the different socio-political contexts of organizations in China and the West, discuss the relationship between bonds or covenants and psychological contracts, and compare tradition linked employee virtues with dimensions of organizational citizenship.     

职场抱怨源对知识型员工创新绩效的影响机制研究

知识型员工的创新绩效是移动互联时代企业获取竞争优势的关键要素。本研究探讨了组织环境中的职场抱怨源对知识型员工创新绩效的影响效应和作用机制。研究发现：职场抱怨源的“与同事关系”、“管理规范化因素”和“物理环境”维度通过负向影响员工建言,而抑制创新绩效;另外,“工作负荷”维度正向影响创新绩效。研究还揭示,相比自我隐藏倾向低的员工,与同事关系不和谐对高自我隐藏倾向知识型员工的建言和创新绩效有更显著的负向影响。最后讨论了研究的理论价值和实践启示。     

Employee Voice in Union and Non-union Australian Workplaces

The fall in unionism and the rise in the non-union workplace over the past two decades raises the question as to whether workers now have a reduced capacity to initiate issues and articulate grievances. For some commentators independent unions are the only source of genuine voice. Others have argued that the adoption of the HRM paradigm within an enterprise will provide workers with adequate voice mechanisms. This paper addresses the issue by comparing employee voice in non-union and unionized Australian workplaces.     

New Forms of Employee Involvement at European Level — The Case of the European Company (SE)

This article focuses on important but widely neglected problems of supranational employee involvement both at the level of information and consultation as well as at board level. It takes the most important pattern, the European Company (SE), and presents a systematic empirical analysis of its negotiated forms of worker representation and employee involvement. The questions addressed are: What do these new forms of collective voice and representation at the supranational level look like? What is the relevance of SEs for the development of an emerging system of European industrial relations in a broader perspective? Is the negotiated form of employee involvement likely to lead to new forms of harmonization and convergence or rather to heterogeneity and fragmentation?     

Information technology change,work complexity and service jobs: a contingent perspective

We examine the contingent impact of implementing an enterprise‐wide information technology system (Enterprise Resource Planning) on perceptions of work complexity in clerical, technical and managerial service sector jobs. Using matched and control samples of employee survey data, we compare pre‐ and post‐intervention perceptions of work complexity and importance of analytical skills across three hierarchical job levels: clerical, technical and managerial. We find that employees in clerical jobs, at the lowest level in the hierarchy, experience a significant increase in work complexity and need for analytical skills, whereas those in technical and managerial service jobs do not. Implications for theory, management of technology and employment policy are discussed.     

Employee perceptions of management relations as influences on job satisfaction and quit intentions

In this paper we use a relational approach to investigate how employee perceptions of their relationships with three types of managers—senior, line, and human resource managers—are related to employees’ job satisfaction and intention to quit. Based on an employee survey (n = 1,533), and manager network data (n = 140) in ten organizations operating in Australia, we found that the extent of agreement between employees’ perceptions of their relations with senior and line management was positively related to these outcome variables. In addition, we found these relationships were strengthened in organizations where HR and line managers reported high-frequency communication between the two groups. Implications of our findings are briefly canvassed.     

Reputation gaps and the performance of service organizations

Links between the reputation of organizations and their financial performance are intuitively attractive to assume, but often difficult to demonstrate convincingly. Gaps between employee and customer perceptions of corporate reputation have traditionally been associated with poor performance. In the context of service business and applying assimilation‐contrast theory, we hypothesize that the nature of such gaps will, in reality, have a differential effect on future revenue depending on the size and valence of the gap. The effects of small gaps should be assimilated by customers, but larger ones have a greater potential of creating a contrast effect resulting in significant increases or decreases in subsequent sales. In businesses where employees have a more positive view of the company reputation than customers, we hypothesize a growth in future sales, and where they have a relatively more negative view, a decline. We test the effects of what we label as reputation gaps in 56 business units drawn from nine service organizations and confirm our hypotheses. Among the implications of our findings are that managing reputation by elevating employee perceptions of a company's reputation above those perceived by its customers holds the potential to enhance future sales. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Unionization,Compensation, and Voice Effects on Quits and Retention

This study explores the relationships among unionization, compensation practices, and employee attachment (quit rates and tenure) among trucking companies to assess the applicability of Freeman and Medoff's exit/voice argument. Unionization was associated with lower quit rates, higher tenure, a better compensation package, and stronger voice mechanisms. The relationship of unionization to quit rates and tenure becomes nonsignificant after accounting for compensation (pay and benefits), and voice mechanisms do not add explanatory variance.