Alexander J. S. Colvin

Employee Voice, Human Resource Practices, and Quit Rates: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry

The authors draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theories to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict firm-level quit rates, then empirically evaluate the predictive power of these variables using data from a 1998 establishment-level survey in the telecommunications industry. With respect to alternative voice mechanisms, they find that union representation predicts lower quit rates, even after they control for compensation and a wide range of other human resource practices that may be affected by collective bargaining. Also predicting lower quit rates is employee participation in offline problem-solving groups and in self-directed teams. No apparent association is found between quit rates and the availability of nonunion dispute resolution procedures. Regarding human resource practices, higher relative wages and internal promotion policies predict lower quit rates, and contingent staffing, electronic monitoring, and variable pay predict higher rates.

Institutional Pressures, Human Resource Strategies, and the Rise of Nonunion Dispute Resolution Procedures

The author investigates factors influencing the adoption of dispute resolution procedures in the nonunion workplace. Various explanations are tested using data from a 1998 survey of dispute resolution procedures in the telecommunications industry. The results suggest that both institutional pressures and human resource strategies are factors driving the adoption of nonunion procedures. Among institutional factors, rising individual employment rights litigation and expanded court deferral to nonunion arbitration have led to increased adoption of mandatory arbitration procedures in the nonunion workplace. At the same time, an older institutional factor—union substitution by nonunion employers aimed at avoiding union organizing—continues to inspire the adoption of nonunion dispute resolution procedures, especially peer review. Finally, the results provide some support for a link between the use of high performance work systems and the adoption of nonunion dispute resolution procedures.

Improved Metrics for Workplace Dispute Resolution Procedures: Efficiency, Equity, and Voice

Many debates surround systems for resolving workplace disputes. In the United States, traditional unionized grievance procedures, emerging nonunion dispute resolution systems, and the court-based system for resolving employment law disputes have all been criticized. What is missing from these debates are rich metrics beyond speed and satisfaction for comparing and evaluating dispute resolution systems. In this paper, we develop efficiency, equity, and voice as these standards. Unionized, nonunion, and employment law procedures are then qualitatively evaluated against these three metrics.

The Dual Transformation of Workplace Dispute Resolution

This study examines the impact on grievance rates of variation in the structure of nonunion dispute resolution procedures and in systems of work organization. Nonunion dispute resolution procedures that feature nonmanagerial decision makers had higher grievance rates than nonunion procedures with managerial decision makers. Grievance rates also were lower in workplaces that had adopted self-managed teams.

Flexibility and Fairness in Liberal Market Economies: The Comparative Impact of the Legal Environment and High-Performance Work Systems

This paper compares management flexibility in employment decision making in the United States and Canada through a cross-national survey of organizations in representative jurisdictions in each country, Pennsylvania and Ontario, respectively, that investigates the impact of differences in their legal environments. The results indicate that, compared to their Ontario counterparts, organizations in Pennsylvania have a higher degree of flexibility in employment outcomes, such as higher dismissal and discipline rates, yet do not experience any greater flexibility or simplicity in management hiring and firing decisions. One explanation for this result may lie in the finding that organizations in Pennsylvania experience greater legal pressures on decision making, reflecting the generally more intense conflict in the employment law system in the United States. By contrast, high-performance work systems, which some have looked to as a possible management-driven mechanism for enhancing fairness in employment, had more modest effects.

Convergence in Industrial Relations Institutions: The Emerging Anglo-American Model?

At the outset of the Thatcher/Reagan era, the employment and labor law systems across six Anglo-American countries could be divided into three pairings: the Wagner Act model of the United States and Canada; the Voluntarist system of collective bargaining and strong unions in the United Kingdom and Ireland; and the highly centralized, legalistic Award systems of Australia and New Zealand. The authors argue that there has been growing convergence in two major areas: First, of labor law toward a private ordering of employment relations in which terms and conditions of work and employment are primarily determined at the level of the enterprise; and second, of individual employment rights, toward a basket of minimum standards that can then be improved upon by the parties. The greatest similarity is found in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Ireland retains a greater degree of public ordering, while the United States diverges in favoring the interests of employers over those of employees and organized labor. The authors explore reasons for the convergence.

ADOPTION AND USE OF DISPUTE RESOLUTION PROCEDURES IN THE NONUNION WORKPLACE

This paper investigates the adoption, structure, and function of dispute resolution procedures in the nonunion workplace. Whereas grievance procedures in unionized workplaces have been an important area of study in the field of industrial relations, research on dispute resolution procedures in nonunion workplaces has lagged behind. As a result, our knowledge of the development of nonunion procedures remains relatively limited. Similarly, with a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Lewin, 1987, 1990), our knowledge of workplace grievance activity is almost entirely based on research conducted in unionized settings. Given the major differences in the institutional contexts of union and nonunion workplaces in the United States, existing ideas about workplace dispute resolution developed in the unionized setting will likely require significant modification in order to understand dispute resolution procedures and activity in the nonunion workplace. Issues relating to dispute resolution in the nonunion workplace are of increasing importance to public policy given the combination of continued stagnation in levels of union representation and mounting concerns over rising levels of employment litigation in the courts. Knowing what nonunion dispute resolution procedures look like and how they function will help answer the question of what role these procedures may play in the future governance of the workplace.

American Workplace Dispute Resolution in the Individual Rights Era

This article presents a theoretical conceptualization of the rise of alternative dispute resolution and its impact on American employment relations in the individual rights era. The idea of an industrial relations system advanced by Dunlop is no longer a plausible general approach for understanding American employment relations given the decline of organized labor. This article examines the question of whether a new individual employment rights-based system of employment relations has replaced it. The old New Deal industrial relations system was based on three pillars: labor contracts that provided a web of rules governing the workplace; economic strikes, actual or threatened, which provided the bargaining power for unions to negotiate these contracts; and labor arbitration, which provided the workplace dispute resolution mechanism for enforcing these contracts. The institutions of the new individual employment rights era can be seen as based on three parallel elements: individual employment rights provide the new web of rules; litigation, actual or threatened, provides the new source of bargaining power for employees; and alternative dispute resolution procedures provide the new workplace-based mechanism for enforcing individual rights. However, each of these elements contains substantial limitations, which makes the institutional structures of the new individual employment rights era something different from a new Dunlopian integrated system.

Organizational systems and employee motivation

Motivation in and of Teams: A Framework ................................................ 288 Generalizability of Motivational Concepts to the Team Level ................ 291 Motivational Processes: Goal Generation and Goal-Striving Processes .................................................................................... 291 Motivational States ............................................................................... 293 Research Needs ..................................................................................... 296 Cross-Level Interplay Between Individual and Team Motivation ......... 298 Research Needs ..................................................................................... 300 Multilevel Antecedence and Outcomes of Motivation in and of Teams 301 Research Needs ..................................................................................... 303 Boundary Conditions Affecting Motivational Phenomena in and of Teams ................................................................................................. 305 Team Type .............................................................................................. 305 Team Interdependence ......................................................................... 306 Team Developmental Stages................................................................ 307 Cultural Differences ............................................................................. 308 Conclusion ........................................................................................................310 References ........................................................................................................311Series Forward Robert D. Pritchard Foreward Lyman Porter Preface and Acknowledgements The Authors Contributors I. Scientific Foundations Chapter 1: The three Cs of work motivation: Content, context, and change Ruth Kanfer, Robert D. Pritchard, & Gilad Chen Chapter 2: The measurement and analysis of motivation Robert E. Ployhart Chapter 3: Motivation for what: The criterion question Reeshad Dalal & Charles L. Hulin II. Motivational Processes Chapter 4: Goal choice and decision processes Howard J. Klein, James T. Austin, & Joesph T. Cooper Chapter 5: Goal striving and self-regulation processes James M. Diefendorff & Robert G. Lord Chapter 6: Self-regulation and multiple deadline goals Terence R. Mitchell, Wendy S. Harman, Thomas W. Lee, & Dong-Yeol Lee III. Proximal Environmental Influences Chapter 7: Designing motivating jobs: An expanded framework for linking work characteristics and motivation Sharon K. Parker & Sandra Ohly Chapter 8: Motivation in and of work teams: A multi-level perspective Gilad Chen & Celile Gogus Chapter 9: Leadership processes and work motivation Stephen J. Zaccaro, Katherine Hildebrand, & Jonathan Nelson Chapter 10: Organizational systems and employee motivation Wendy R. Boswell, Alexander J.S. Colvin, & Todd C. Darnold IV. Temporal and Distal Contextual influences Chapter 11: Motivation to engage in training and career development Daniel C. Feldman & Thomas W. H. Ng Chapter 12: Successful Navigation of Career Transitions: Implications for and from work motivation theory Connie R. Wanberg & John Kammeyer-Mueller Chapter 13: Non-work influences on work motivation Ellen E. Kossek & Kaumudi Misra Chapter 14: Socio-cultural influences on work motivation Miriam Erez V. Future prospects Chapter 15: Essays from Allied Disciplines * Introduction * Making time for memory and remembering time in motivation theory Stephen M. Fiore C. The Social Context of Work Motivation: A Social-Psychological Perspective Verlin B. Hinsz D. Motivation and expertise at work: A Human Factors Perspective Eduardo Salas, Katherine A. Wilson, & Rebecca Lyons E. Motivation in health psychology: A Social-Cognitive Perspective James E. Maddux F. Law and motivation Gary L. Renz & Richard D. Arvey G. Work motivation: Insights from Economics Bruce E. Kaufman Chapter 16: Work Motivation: Forging New Perspectives and Directions in the Post-Millennium Ruth Kanfer, Gilad Chen, & Robert D. Pritchard Author Biographies

Participation Versus Procedures in Non‐Union Dispute Resolution

This study examines the resolution of conflict in non‐union workplaces. Employee participation in workplace decision making and organizational dispute resolution procedures are two factors hypothesized to influence the outcomes of conflicts in the non‐union workplace. The adoption of high involvement work systems is found to produce an organizational context in which both triggering events for conflict, such as disciplinary and dismissal decisions, and dispute resolution activities, such as grievance filing and appeals, are reduced in frequency. Dispute resolution procedures have mixed impacts. Greater due process protections in dispute resolution procedures in non‐union workplaces are associated with increased grievance filing and higher appeal rates but do not have significant impacts on the precursors to conflict. This study provides evidence of substantial organizational‐level variation in non‐union conflict resolution, suggesting the importance of expanding the predominant individual and group‐level focus of current conflict management research to include more organizational‐level factors. It also supports the importance to non‐union employee representation of direct participation strategies involving employee involvement in the workplace, in addition to procedures that provide for off‐line representation.