The Climate of Workplace Relations (Routledge Revivals)

Ali Dastmalchian, Paul Blyton, Ray Adamson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138777811
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678311
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1991, this book investigates not only the processes of industrial relations themselves but also the climate in which they work. As well as studying union behaviour, it views the topic from the wider perspective of human resource management and integrates theories of industrial relations and organizational analysis. The extensive empirical evidence presented, which draws on manufacturing and service industries in Canada, is used to examine such areas as cooperation between union and management, employee perceptions and corporate culture.

This interesting reissue will be of importance to all those studying the dynamics of organizations and industrial relations processes, and ways in which a productive climate can be established and maintained.

1 Setting the stage

A leading industrial relations academic in Britain subtitled a recent book ‘Theory and Practice in a Cold Climate’ (Hyman 1989). The phrase is apt: the 1980s was at best an inclement decade in which to pursue many aspects of industrial relations enquiry. During that decade, several factors achieved prominence in many of the leading industrial countries which significantly altered the context in which industrial relations take place. Among the most important of these were: general economic recession in the early 1980s and persistently high levels of unemployment; the contraction of manufacturing and extractive industries which formerly represented trade union strongholds; the growth of production and service activities often employ-ing workforces with little or no previous experience of union representation; the reassertion of managerial power over labour issues; and the implementation of state policies variously designed to reduce state monopolies and to deliver a less protected labour force to the market-place.

Though many of these trends were present long before the 1980s, a number became increasingly salient in latter years and, by coinciding, have collectively exerted a substantial impact on the nature of industrial relations, undermining a broad pattern which had been developing in several industrial market economies since 1945. Indeed, one view of these developments is that they are prefacing a fundamental shift in power relationships within industrial relations, thereby allowing an increasing management withdrawal from reliance on ‘union-management’ relations based on collective bargaining and the substituting of a more ‘employee relations’ orientation with a greater emphasis on individualized negotiation and contract determination.

Yet, while it is clear from various studies that in many work organizations the character of industrial relations has changed significantly during the 1980s, the argument here (and developed in more detail in chapter 2) is that those relations – and the enquiry which seeks greater insight into them – remains no less important today than in any previous period. Indeed, as we discuss below, several of the paths along which managers have been initiating changes in recent years (for example, the pursuit of higher quality standards, lower staffing levels, and the procurement and creation of goods and services ‘just-in-time’ to satisfy a demand) can act as much to enhance labour power as to diminish it.

More generally, the continued emphasis both by practitioners and academics on the social organization of work – the importance given to worker attitudes, motivation and commitment, the acquisition of skills and training, and the design of work tasks and work teams, for example – all attest to a recognition of the continued significance of the work-force in contemporary work organizations. It is this attestation which underpins our belief in the continued importance of both the practice and the study of industrial relations. Moreover, while it is the changes taking place in the field of employment relations which have attracted most attention in the academic and management literature, there is also considerable evidence of important continuities in the attitudes and behaviours comprising those relations. While some aspects of industrial relations have altered markedly in the last decade, others have shown themselves surprisingly impervious to change.

THE STUDY OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

If industrial relations remain an important area for future enquiry, the question this still begs is, what sort of enquiry? The corpus of industrial relations knowledge is not of sufficient standing to encourage a simple extension of past practice. One lacuna, for example, which various writers have alluded to at different times, is that of theory and concept development. According to Hyman, this lack of theory has led to undue prominence being given to systems theory in North America and to pluralism in the UK, despite the significant shortcomings in each (Hyman 1989). Recent advances in theorizing, such as those emerging from the labour process debate (Knights and Willmott 1990), have improved the situation but have not yet been sufficient to rectify the inadequacy of theoretical development in industrial relations, including the development of ‘middle range’ theories which seek to draw the links between general theories and particular patterns, strategies and practices of industrial relations, and thereby seek explanations for why the character of industrial relations differs from one context to another.

Another shortcoming evident in past British and, particularly, North American industrial relations enquiry has been a widespread tendency among researchers to limit the field of enquiry to the processes of collective bargaining and related institutions, rather than adopting a broader definition of influences on, arenas for, and outcomes of, industrial relations. In the US in particular, this can be seen to have had important consequences for the general health of the subject and was one reason why the changing fortunes of trade unionism in the US from the mid-1950s onwards also marked the end of what has been termed a ‘golden age’ of industrial relations research in that country. As we have written elsewhere, and in part echoing an earlier argument by Strauss and Feuille (1978), ‘it is partly due to its development as an “institutionally oriented field centred on collected bargaining” that industrial relations research did not develop the theoretical base and intellectual breadth and excitement sufficient to prevent some academic drift away from this field of enquiry in the 1960s’ (Blyton et al. 1987: 207).

Yet one of the continuing strengths of industrial relations is its ability to draw upon and draw together several relevant disciplines (sociology, psychology, law, economics, politics, history, etc.) to inform its analysis of particular industrial relations situations and events. Where this has been translated into a cross-fertilization of concepts, the results have often been fruitful in providing industrial relations researchers with additional tools and frameworks of analysis. For example, sociological concepts such as role, orientation, control, power, dependence, and the institutionalization of conflict have provided valuable insights into the behaviour of particular industrial relations actors and the functioning of industrial relations processes as a whole (Nicholson 1976; Lockwood 1966; Hyman 1975; Ursell and Blyton 1988; Coser 1956). Similar claims can be made on behalf of political science (which has informed industrial relations on concepts such as pluralism) and economics (offering insights into such areas as pay, productivity, and performance).

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AND ORGANIZATION THEORY

The present study was partly based on a belief that this process of cross-fertilization could usefully be taken further. It seems logical to expect that just as the dynamics of work organizations do not neatly compartmentalize into the subject areas traditionally taught separately in most business schools and university departments, so too, many of the major concepts developed in one area will potentially have a bearing on, and an application in, related subject areas. The background of the authors – organization theory (Dastmalchian), industrial relations (Blyton) and organizational behaviour (Adamson) – encouraged particular attention to the potential of organizational research for informing industrial relations enquiry (and vice versa). Despite the continued advocacy of greater cross-boundary activity, and the illustration of its utility in the work of a small number of academics primarily working in the United States, most notably George Strauss (Strauss and Feuille 1978; Strauss 1987; also Brett 1980; Kochan 1980; Thomson and Warner 1981; Lewin and Feuille 1983; Beaumont 1990), the organizational and industrial relations areas have not been as closely connected in the past as their overlapping subject matter might suggest. There are many possible reasons for this, over and above the general problems of academic over-specialization.

One hindrance may have been the tendency for organizational research to be more ‘managerial’ in orientation compared to industrial relations research, which has often in the past been more informed by an analysis of trade union activity. This managerialism has been much more typical of what is defined (particularly by North Americans) as organizational behaviour, which focuses primarily on individuals and examines concepts such as motivation and leadership, compared to organization theory (OT) which principally addresses the structure and behaviour of groups within organizations, rather than that of individuals. For Daft, OT is the sociology of organizations, concentrating on the social system, while organizational behaviour (OB) is the psychology of organizations, concentrating on the individual person (Daft 1988: 26). As will become clear, our own work is rather more informed by OT than OB. Our climate construct, level of analysis, choice of methods, identification of dependent and independent variables, etc. are more closely aligned with OT. In recent years, OT has entered into a considerable amount of rethinking and self-questioning with regard to the identity of the field, its methodologies, and its relations with other branches of enquiry (Organization Studies 1988; Donaldson 1985), as well as theory-building and development (Academy of Management Review 1989). With this, and with the emergence of organizational culture as a new paradigm for understanding organizations, OT appears as ripe for greater cross-fertilization as industrial relations (IR) would seem to be. While the emphasis in this book tends to be mainly on the potential for industrial relations to gain from closer association with organization theory, we try not to lose sight of the value of the traffic moving in the other direction.

One area for possible cross-fertilization which appeared worthy of closer investigation was the concept of ‘climate’. In general, the formal, structural aspects of industrial relations have been studied more extensively than the processes of those relations, particularly the informal processes. Further, while particular studies have considered the attitudes of different groups to aspects of industrial relations, less attention has been paid to the general attitudinal context or atmosphere in which industrial relations is conducted. This is not the case in organizational research, however. Since first discussed in the late 1950s (e.g. Argyris 1958), the concept of organizational climate has attracted considerable attention, and not a little debate on how it might be satisfactorily measured. There is widespread agreement, however, that climate comprises the norms, feelings and attitudes - the ‘atmosphere’ – prevailing in an organization. More recently, the literature on organizational climate has been supplemented by a growing attention paid to organizational ‘cultures’. The distinction between climate and culture remains ill-defined, and has not been assisted either by those commentators who have used the terms interchangeably or by enquirers into aspects of culture often neglecting the existing body of research on climate (Rousseau 1988: 140). However, the concept of organizational culture generally refers to an overarching set of beliefs, norms, expectations, and ways of working that is usually generated over a long period by a combination of factors, and remains relatively impervious to short-term fluctuations. One of the contributing factors to this culture is the attitudinal climate in which employees function, and which is susceptible to a greater degree of volatility (the effect of volatility in any one contributor to culture is diminished by the presence of several other contributing factors). We return to this relationship of climate and culture at a number of points in subsequent chapters.

Over time, the organizational climate concept has been refined and as part of this a number of studies have investigated the validity of viewing organizations not as characterized by a single, all-encompassing climate, but rather as several distinct climates attaching to different aspects of the organization (Schneider et al. 1980; Zohar 1980). Within this development, a small number of researchers had begun, by the late 1970s, to explore the concept of industrial relations climate (Nicholson 1979; Warr et al. 1978; Kelly and Nicholson 1980). Coupled with the findings from a small climate study of our own (Dastmalchian et al. 1982) this early work was sufficiently encouraging to suggest that the efforts involved in a more detailed study would be repaid by clarifying what many involved in the practice and study of industrial relations view as critical – the general atmosphere in which industrial relations are conducted.

THE STUDY

Our intention, therefore, was to create a working model of how climate might be related to industrial relations structures and processes and outcomes at the establishment level, and then to proceed to devise a reliable measure of climate and apply this to a range of industrial relations contexts. While always aware of the need to take into account the influences of head offices and other centralizing aspects of industrial relations, it was our aim to focus on workplace arenas where union representatives met management on a day to day basis to conduct industrial relations. By establishing the links between climate and the other elements of workplace industrial relations (inputs, processes, and outcomes) our aim was to shed light not only on what factors influenced climate but also on the dynamics of workplace industrial relations and the organizational factors outside the immediate union-management context which influenced the conduct and outcomes of those relations.

The choice of research design was guided by a desire to gain benefits from a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. In a discussion of changing fashions in methods of enquiry in industrial relations research, Lewin and Strauss contrast the predominantly micro-level case-study approach undertaken in the 1950s with more recent research relying increasingly on complex data manipulation techniques made available through access to computer technology (Lewin and Strauss 1988).

However, in some, if not in many cases, this availability of sophisticated number-crunching capability has been a mixed blessing. What has been gained in being able to handle a large range of variables and unearth subtle relationships within large samples, has often been at the cost of losing some of the ‘reality’ of industrial relations. That reality is people – people making decisions, interacting with one another, adjusting (or not) to each other’s expectations. Only by looking in detail at specific industrial relations contexts can this reality of the subject be conveyed. Yet at the same time it would be a mistake to ignore the power of modern technology for handling large samples: not least because this gives us a little more confidence when deciding whether or not results have any generalizability.

The optimum route, therefore, would seem to be one which seeks to take advantage of both approaches: gathering both quantitative and qualitative data to provide a broad context in which to examine the key issues of the enquiry in particular work contexts. It is this thinking which informs the present approach. The end result is in fact more quantitative and computer-dependent than we would have wished. This is partly because there was no satisfactory measure of IR climate that we could take off the shelf, and the process of generating and refining a measure of climate could only adequately be accomplished through large-scale testing, in order to pin down the important but nebulous concept of climate. However, the case-studies examined in chapter 6 represent an integral part of our analysis and indicate ways in which the influence of industrial relations climate can be tracked over time.

A word is necessary on the source of the data and its broader relevance and applicability. The quantitative and case-study material reported in later chapters is largely Canadian in origin. Given the various regulations and other specifics of different national contexts and their impact on the conduct of industrial relations, it is likely that many readers will judge the relevance of the study as pertaining primarily to that country. It will be our argument, however, that while the climate measure was developed and refined largely on the basis of Canadian data, it nevertheless could have wider applicability. The nature of Canadian industrial relations, the lengths taken to validate the measure and our efforts to create a general measure of IR climate which was equally applicable in car plants, hospitals, breweries, and hotels, gives us some confidence that the measure represents at least a good starting-point for studying industrial relations climates in countries outside Canada. Furthermore, in addition to the Canadian work, we have benefited from an early pilot-study undertaken in Britain (Dastmalchian et al. 1982), the extensive collection of climate data within an Australian national corporation (Zeffane et al. 1990), and from a series of discussions with managers in Britain and Australia concerning the nature of IR climate within their organizations.

PLAN OF THE BOOK

No period in history is static, but in terms of the context in which industrial relations takes place, the last ten years have been characterized by significant and widespread change – not since before World War II (and perhaps not even then) have two decades been characterized by such contrasting industrial relations milieux as the 1970s and 1980s. It w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• 1 Setting the stage
• 2 Change and continuity in workplace industrial relations
• 3 The climate concept
• 4 The research design
• 5 The overall findings
• 6 The case-study analysis
• 7 Conclusions and future inquiry
• Appendix 1 The interview schedule and climate questionnaire
• Appendix 2 Three cross-sectional case studies*
• References
• Index