MANAGEMENT EMPLOYEE RELATIONS

Management Employee Relations



Management Employee Relations

Introduction

Until recently the dominant debates within human resource management (HRM) have paid little attention to HR practice in the employee relations. The concern with the degree to which HRM represented a distinctive style of people management had little resonance for public services, widely viewed as subscribing to traditional patterns of personnel management. The emphasis on establishing the links between HRM and corporate performance was of limited relevance to services answerable to a wide range of stakeholders and with contested performance outcomes; and public service organizations rarely figured as exemplars of leading edge HR practice. Curiously, even developments that might have been viewed as highly relevant to HR practice in the public services, such as customer-employee relations and the changing shape of the HR function, paid scant attention to the employee relations (Marsden, 1994, 243).

These perspectives, which assume that there is little noteworthy in HR practice in the employee relations have been challenged. Over the last two decades, with varying degrees of intensity, reforms of the employee relations, have been adopted across most countries with significant consequences for HR practice (Pollitt and Boukaert, 2004). Many of these reforms stemmed from the new public management (NPM) movement, based on an assumption that management practice in the private sector was equally applicable to developments in the employee relations. This development encouraged some convergence of HR practice between the public and private sector and more attention being directed towards HR issues (Farrell, 2003 ,56). There has been increased recognition that structural reforms of public services have paid insufficient attention to HR issues: workforce motivation; staff responses to reform; and the degree to which organizations have the HR capacity and competencies to manage change effectively. The World Health Organization (WHO) amongst others, have therefore suggested that effective HR practice is the key challenge confronting reform of health systems (Kessler, 2006b, 28).

Less well documented is an emerging trend that reverses the dominant orthodoxy that the employee relations can benefit from the transfer of HR practices that derive from the commercial sector and suggests that the private sector may have things to learn from the prevailing HR ethos in the employee relations. In part driven by concerns about 'capitalism unleashed' (Dunleavy,2006 ,94) and in the wake of corporate scandals at Enron and elsewhere, there is agrudging acknowledgement that core values associated with public service, trust, impartiality and integrity, need to be preserved and reinforced in the employee relations. HR policies and organizational cultures that foster such values have relevance for contemporary corporations, exemplified by the surge of interest in corporate social responsibility. Private sector companies' operating environment resembles more closely long-standing features of the public domain: accountability to multiple stakeholders, relatively open scrutiny of performance; and the need to maintain public trust. Consequently, diffusion of HR practice is becoming more two-way, in contrast to the orthodox assumption that the employee relations can benefit from the adoption of private sector 'best practice' (Kessler, 2006a, ...