Dionne Pohler

Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice: The Impact of Unions and High-Involvement Work Practices on Work Outcomes

Theory and research surrounding employee voice in organizations have often treated high-involvement work practices (HIWPs) as substitutes for unions. Drawing on recent theoretical developments in the field of industrial relations, specifically the collective voice/institutional response model of union impact and research on HIWPs in organizations, the authors propose that these institutions are better seen as complements whereby greater balance is achieved between efficiency, equity, and voice when HIWPs are implemented in the presence of unions. Based on a national sample of Canadian organizations, they find employees covered by a union experience fewer intensification pressures under higher levels of diffusion of HIWPs such that they work less unpaid overtime, have fewer grievances, and take fewer paid sick days. Job satisfaction is maximized under the combination of unions and HIWPs.

Are Unions Good or Bad for Organizations? The Moderating Role of Management's Response

Union impact research has been hindered by an underdeveloped conceptualization of management response, contributing to inconclusive empirical findings. Integrating the collective voice/institutional response model with the appropriateness framework, we propose that an employee-focused business strategy is a critical moderating variable in the relationship between union density and organizational outcomes that mitigates the negative effects of unions and enhances the positive effects by sending a clear signal of managements intentions to co-operate. Using a panel dataset of Canadian organizations over six years, we provide empirical evidence to support our arguments. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Pensions as Psychological Contracts: Implications for Work Outcomes

Drawing on psychological contract theory, we develop predictions regarding the moderating influence of the meaning employees assign to their marginal quit costs, as well as on the role of stayer perceptions and saver effects, on various work outcomes under a defined-benefit pension. Results show pension incentives can have favorable or unfavorable effects depending on whether employees perceive them as supportive relational contracts or as low-trust transactional contracts. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

Making Stronger Causal Inferences: Accounting for Selection Bias in Associations Between High Performance Work Systems, Leadership, and Employee and Customer Satisfaction

We develop competing hypotheses about the relationship between high performance work systems (HPWS) with employee and customer satisfaction. Drawing on 8 years of employee and customer survey data from a financial services firm, we used a recently developed empirical technique—covariate balanced propensity score (CBPS) weighting—to examine if the proposed relationships between HPWS and satisfaction outcomes can be explained by reverse causality, selection effects, or commonly omitted variables such as leadership behavior. The results provide support for leader behaviors as a primary driver of customer satisfaction, rather than HPWS, and also suggest that the problem of reverse causality requires additional attention in future human resource (HR) systems research. Model comparisons suggest that the estimates and conclusions vary across CBPS, meta-analytic, cross-sectional, and time-lagged models (with and without a lagged dependent variable as a control). We highlight the theoretical and methodological implications of the findings for HR systems research.

Multinationals’ Compliance with Employment Law: An Empirical Assessment Using Administrative Data from Ontario, 2004 to 2015:

This study contributes new evidence to the literature on multinational corporation (MNC) behavior by exploring three related questions: 1) Do MNCs comply with local employment laws in a developed country? 2) To the extent that compliance varies across MNCs, what factors are important in shaping compliance? 3) Is there a “foreignness” effect for MNCs operating in developed countries, and does this effect vary according to country-of-origin and/or union status? To investigate these questions, the authors compiled unique firm-level administrative data on MNC compliance with regulatory and quasi-regulatory employment practices during mass layoffs in Ontario, Canada. Adopting a research design that uses the behavior of Canadian MNCs as the comparison group, their key findings suggest that unions are a very robust predictor of compliance across all foreign MNCs and systematic country-of-origin effects on MNC compliance are present only in non-unionized workplaces.