Power

Please choose ONE of the five listed topics in the attached documents

Please choose ONE of the five listed topics in the attached documents

What is Employee Relations?

Employee Relations involves the body of work concerned with maintaining employer-employee relationships that contribute to satisfactory productivity, motivation, and morale. Essentially, Employee Relations is concerned with preventing and resolving problems involving individuals which arise out of or affect work situations.

Advice is provided to supervisors on how to correct poor performance and employee misconduct. In such instances, progressive discipline and regulatory and other requirements must be considered in effecting disciplinary actions and in resolving employee grievances and appeals. Information is provided to employees to promote a better understanding of management's goals and policies. Information is also provided to employees to assist them in correcting poor performance, on or off duty misconduct, and/or to address personal issues that affect them in the workplace. Employees are advised about applicable regulations, legislation, and bargaining agreements. Employees are also advised about their grievance and appeal rights and discrimination and whistleblower protections.

The management of people at work is evolving to keep pace with changes in the workplace. Personnel management has evolved to human resource management to human capital management as organisations attempt to outperform competitors in a global economy. Successful organisations therefore seek to develop constructive relationships with employees that translate into strategies that draw on the full potential of their people through performance improvement and organisational change. Economic pressures dictate that the rate of change will be more frequent as technology improves and the demand for customised services shifts. Employee relations therefore need to focus on knowledge management and people at an individual level as a competitive advantage. (Bryson, 2001)

UK employee relations has seen significant changes

Explanation

The employment relationship literature has gained huge popularity in the last 30 years in the UK, in large part due to the changes in employee -organization relationships (EORs) occurring in business between employees and employers. The EOR is “an overarching term to describe the relationship between the employee and the organization” (Kelly, J (2000, 62-78) including both micro concepts such as the psychological contract (PC) and perceived organizational support (POS), and macro concepts such as the employment relationship (ER). Each approach to understanding the EOR has strengths and weaknesses, both theoretically and empirically. In this article, we review the current state of the EOR literature, and raise questions about the limitations of current theory and research. Subsequently, we make recommendations for the EOR literature going forward.

Theoretical models

Status of EOR theory

Research on the EOR has drawn upon social exchange (Kelly, J 2000, 62-78) and the inducements-contributions model (Kelly, J (2000, 62-78) to provide the theoretical foundation to understanding the employee and employer perspectives to the exchange. Although different views of social exchange exist, there is consensus amongst theorists that social exchange involves a series of interactions that generate obligations to reciprocate. In essence, three aspects are fundamental to social exchange: relationship, reciprocity and exchange. A social exchange relationship begins with one party bestowing a benefit to ...