Employee Relations: An International Journal

Kathy Monks; Finian Buckley; Anne Sinnott

1997 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/01425459710176945

Evidence from a survey of the Irish Q Mark companies suggests that there are implications for both the human resource (HR) function and for human resource practices where organizations are involved in the implementation of quality intiatives. In some cases the HR function has taken a role in strategic decision making and responsibility for the communications, training and involvement measures necessary to support the quality programmes. HR practices have also changed in some organizations, with a revision of selection, training and appraisal methods. From the employee’s perspective, quality programmes appear to lead, through teamworking and communications mechanisms, to increased involvement. However, the reporting and control measures allied to quality have the potential to increase the monitoring of work and there is little evidence that reward structures have been revised to take account of changes in work practices.

Edmund Heery

1997 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/01425459710176954

Performance‐related pay schemes which link salary to the result of an individual appraisal of performance in the job, have spread extensively over the past ten years. Draws on a national survey of trade unions and survey and case study data from local governement to examine the extent to which the spread of such schemes has been associated with union de‐recognition. Concludes that in many cases unions have been excluded from influence over performance‐related pay and suggests that there may well be a cost for employers in union de‐recognition as schemes appear less rigorous and more informal where there is an absence of union influence.

Jerry Hallier; Philip James

1997 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/01425459710176963

Despite increasing research interest in the psychological contract, little is known about how employees’ contractual beliefs alter during major organizational changes. Using a sample of air traffic control workers who have been used to stable work roles over long periods, examines employees’ contractual responses to enforced job change. As job change approached, contractual acceptance or violation was engendered by sensemaking appraisals of management decisions, the meaning given to premove uncertainties, and perceptions of victimization. Following job change, sense‐making continued and eventually yielded either a calculative assessment of the employment relationship or feelings of sustained violation. While sustained violation was accompanied by visible expressions of resistance against management, such acts represented a desire to reinstate the established employment relationship. Conversely, workers who accommodated the personal outcomes of management breaches became less committed to a contractual relationship, and resolved to exploit management weaknesses and omissions. These divergencies reflected how the contractual meanings given to single breach events were kept separate from panoptic assessments of management’s entire body of behaviour during the reorganization.

René Ten Bos

1997 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/01425459710176972

This highly polemical and Dutch‐rooted article is intended as a contribution to the debates in both popular and academic literature about business process redesign and similar change programmes. Describes BPR and its logical successor, the “holonic” organization, as operational and technocratic instruments which endanger the well‐being of employees (and are therefore morally disreputable) and which undermine the organization’s strategic potential.

Mark Baimbridge; Claire Simpson

1997 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/01425459710176981

Examines trade union subscriptions in relation to the 1993 Trade Union Reform and Employment Rights Act focusing on the Association of University Teachers, where the relationship is examined between subscription payments and hypothesized factors relating to staff, union and institutional characteristics. Finds significant indicators include staff grade, age, gender, the number of part‐time staff, a substitution effect in relation to check‐off together with a quadratic association for union density. Given this series of findings the continued dominance of check‐off as the favoured method of subscription payment, within the confines of this study, appears to be problematic.