Managing Employee Development

1
Managing Employee Development

• Lecture 6
• Employers, Employers Associations and
• Managers

2
Introduction

• Management is both a process and a distinct group
  of roles within the organisation
• Management styles and strategies in employee
  relations result from managers choices
• Human Resource Management appears to emphasize
  individualism, flexibility, commitment,
  co-operation- which are frequently seen as the
  antithesis of trade unionism (collectivism). We
  need to consider how far this can be integrated
  with the right of employee, as a group, to
  participate with management in organisational
  decision making (a genuine equal partnership)
  

3
Management Strategy

• A significant element of management strategy has
  been to diminish the role of joint regulation
  through collective bargaining, particularly
  multi-employer national agreements,and
  re-establish its freedom and prerogative to
  determine terms and conditions of employment.
• However, we need to view any such gain against
  the increasing regulation of employment from
  national and European legislation (determined not
  by collective bargaining but within the political
  system)

4
Managing the Relationship with Employees

• Management Models
• 1) System Actor Management in common with other
  actors in the system (unions and government),
  seeks to maintain a stable system of employee
  relations (institutions, processes and rules)
  through which the organisation may respond to
  pressures (economic, market technology, etc)
• 2) Strategic Actor Management can exercise
  purposeful discretion or choices in making
  decision (both goals and strategies) not only in
  employee relations but also in determining the
  organisations business strategy

5
Process of Strategy Development

• 3) Agent of Capital management is bound by the
  market laws of the capitalist system which
  which constrains them to view labour in terms of
  a factor of production, cost and efficiency. The
  method of legitimising its authority to the
  workforce may vary according to market
  circumstances (direct control, joint
  determination of rules or responsible autonomy)
• Sisson and Wilkinson (1995)
• In analysing the role of employers and management
  in employee relations it is useful to examine the
  following

6
The Role of Employers

• The interrelationship between constraints and
  choices which it is argued, shape managerial
  strategy in employee relations
• Managerial objectives and alternative styles of
  employee relations management
• aspects of the organisational and industrial
  relations system which impinge on the the
  development and execution of managerial
  strategies
• Constraints and Choices
• Environmental Constraints Free Enterprise
  Market/Governmental Policies and Strategies

7
Managements Ability to Exercise Choices

• Material Interests which tend to favour those
  strategies and decisions which are percieved to
  best serve managements economic, productive, and
  power interests, for example strategies intended
  to minimise wage costs and maximise productivity
• Moral idealistic values which regards certain
  issues to be a material principle and a
  particular strategy to be intrinsically right
  in terms of achieving and ideologically based
  goal, strategies to avoid, resist or remove trade
  union recongition or the expansion of collective
  bargaining and thereby support managements
  right to manage

8
Management styles

• Traditional
• Paternalist
• Sophisticated human resource
• Sophisticated modern (bargained)
• Modern paternalist
• Sophisticated consultative
• Human Resource Management Strategic HRM and
  mutual commitment, a strong internal labour
  market, flexible organisational and work systems,
  PRP, employee involvement ad participation,
  extensive communication

9
Workplace Partnership Approach

• Strength and unity of employers associations e.g.
  IBEC
• National Association or Federations, specialised
  associations, local associations
• CBI, IDA employers forum
• Support for a partnership approach,
• Internationalisation, global management practices
  
• Summary