Power dynamics in work and employment

relationships: the capacity for employees

influence
by Beatha N Kapolo and
Rupak
 Dimension 6: Non-Union Employee Voice

• The role of different actors and labour market institutions such as states and unions can
affect the capacity of employees to influence their working conditions and
management’s capacity to make certain choices (CIPD report, 2017)
• The key driver on the shifting power dynamic within employment relationship is the
capacity of the employees to leverage influence about their term of reference
• This article however reported that, non union voice is one dynamic that can undermine
union legitimacy
• It focused on mostly management-initiated forms of voice, that may include:

 Both individual voice and collective non- union employee representation (NER)
channels as mechanisms with potential to affect the balance of power between
employer and employee.
• We tried to analyses this dynamic from the perspective of form, scope and depth of
influence
 The focus of analysis?

3. The Depth of
1.The form of influence:
influence 2.The Scope of • The degree to which
• The degree of influence employees have
influence can be: The types of topics input into
the employees have managerial decision
 Direct form ability to exert process
which included influence over
various It can be;
It can be:
management-led Narrow- trivial • Deep, high level
initiative and issues workers involvement
 Indirect form Broad-substantive • Shallow, no workers
includes non issues such as involvement and
union employee preference working they are purely
hours informed of
representative decisions already
made
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 The Form & Scope of Influence

•This study found that Organizational behavior (OB) and human resource management (HRM) literatures tend to privilege

individualized dialogue, primarily through direct communication between employees and their manager.

•These ideas on voice generally link to high-performance work systems (HPWS) and employee engagement, by augmenting

employee commitment and satisfaction

•Evidence suggests, however, that employee influence is constrained or fragmented.

•In some literatures (especially managerial traditions in OB and HRM), the prospect of utilizing voice to express grievances

that question or disagree with management tend to be brushed aside.

•Management and employee interests are somehow united by a common goal exclusively geared to enhance organizational

performance  however through a degree of unitarist overtone.

 - Other perspectives advance more pluralist ideas that employee and manager interests do converge in some settings, but
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can also be opposed on other matters and non-union voice may offer opportunities to leverage influence without making
 Gaps in Knowledge.

• The problem, there are few non-union voice studies that specifically ask employees how

they value such arrangements in terms of depth, level or scope of influence.

• Research tends to paint an either/ or picture in which non-union voice can be seen as

rosy and upbeat with unitarist overtones, and somehow inherently less extensive than

union voice because it lacks independence from company management.

• It is rare for non- union voice to be examined irrespective of a direct comparison with

union participation, although ironically there is a rich tradition of studying mechanisms

such as team working as a voice mechanism but in a disconnect manner. 5

 Challenges

• Identifying non-union voice mechanisms and predicting their effects on employee influence is often presented in

highly unitarist terms in much HRM and OB literatures.

• However, other critical studies point out that contextualizing employee experiences can be uneven and signal

weaker degrees of influence, especially the tendency to contextualize collective NER against the counterpart of

unionized participation.

 Potential future avenues of research include unpicking non-union influences and how they play out in practice in

different situations as non- union organizations are not all the same.

 The extent to which different non-union voice arrangements permit employee involvement in decision-making and

over what issues – for example, differentiating the depth of influence as a form of communication (low), consultation

(medium) to negotiating decision-making outcomes (high influence)

 How the scope of issues dealt with by NER representatives is determined the motives and reasons as to why and

how managers opt to implement double-breasting voice arrangements.

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References