The views and values of managers and/or owners have been shown to be an important ingredient in the type of systems they chose to apply when dealing with employeeswhether these be wedded to pluralist or unitarian ideas about the nature of work and workplace relations, or to collectivist or individualist ideas about how workers and their representatives should be regarded. The literature in this area too has typically looked at this question with little regard for the size or scale of the organizations in which the systems operate. This paper disaggregates these views and values by looking at the impact of various managerial styles on the conduct of employment relations in differently sized organizations. The discussion concludes that large organizations confront market conditions and contain operational contingencies which allow them to make certain choices about employment relations in ways that are not always available to small to medium-sized organizations, and that the same is true in the opposite direction.
The research literature is replete with descriptions and surveys of the key rules and
institutions of industrial relations and the key practices and processes of HRM that
compete with or complement such relations. Both sides of this animated debate have
been considered with much explication provided of the type of contextual circumstances in
which contemporary employment relations operate. Much of what is discussed in these regards
has been underpinned by two implied assumptions. The first is that employment relations only
ever occurs in organizations that are large enough to attract the attention of trade unions and/
or are sufficiently profitable to run sophisticated labor management programs. |
