Workplace Cooperation: Important, But Difficult

On Monday I had the honor of the receiving the 2020 Melvin Lurie Labor-Management Cooperation Prize. This award honors the memory of Melvin Lurie, a Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and founder of what is now its Master of Human Resources and Labor Relations (MHRLR) program. The prize is intended to continue and enhance Professor Lurie’s legacy of promoting the practice and further the development of cooperation between labor and management.

As part of the ceremony, I delivered a lecture on "Workplace Cooperation: Important, But Difficult." This presentation highlights the connections between balanced employment relationships and workplace cooperation, and the difficulties of achieving and sustaining meaningful cooperation. Here is a video version:  

Why I Just Can’t Tell You What Works

A tweet from Rae Cooper reminded me that the World Congress for the International Labor and Employment Relations Association was in Seoul exactly a year ago. I have lots of great memories from that conference, but something else has stuck with me, too. In a session on conflict resolution someone made a comment along the lines of “just tell us what works.”

At first glance this might sound sensible. There are many approaches to conflict resolution and effective resolution is important. Indeed, most areas to pertaining to work and employment are complicated, and good practices are important for individuals, their organizations, and society. Of course it’s important to understand what works and what doesn’t. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that we can’t judge what works without knowing the criteria for success, but this is not usually stated. In conflict resolution, when someone says “just tell me what works,” they probably are implicitly equating success to settling the dispute. But everyone might not agree that this is the key or only measure of success. Some might be concerned with speed or cost, others with a fair outcome, others with due process. At a minimum, we need to explicitly specify objectives to know what we are evaluating something against. Moreover, this should prompt consideration of what this might be leaving out. By jumping straight to “what works?” we fail to recognize not only what’s prioritized, but also what’s excluded.

And in the world of work where things are complicated, there are likely to be multiple objectives that are important. I have long advocated for three broad objectives: efficiency, equity, and voice. But these can be in conflict with each other. In dispute resolution, for example, a fast resolution method (achieving efficiency) might not consider a lot of evidence (low equity) or allow for much participation beyond a unilateral decision maker (low voice). Alex Colvin and I then illustrated how these trade-offs are embodied in various methods for resolving employment disputes:

Source: John W. Budd and Alexander J.S. Colvin (2008) "Improved Metrics for Workplace Dispute Resolution Procedures: Efficiency, Equity, and Voice," Industrial Relations 47(3): 460-79.

As such, once we identify multiple objectives, it’s not just a simple matter of “what works.” Rather we face the more difficult problem of balancing trade-offs. This doesn’t just apply to conflict resolution, but applies broadly to the entire scope of employment. For example, different systems for setting the terms and conditions of employment and work rules embody different trade-offs between efficiency, equity, and voice:

Source: John W. Budd (2004) Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).

So what works in the world of work? Sorry, there are no easy answers. We must first explicitly identify objectives, consider what this both includes and excludes, and judge the various trade-offs.

What Do Industrial Relations Scholars Research? From the Traditional to the Emergent (and a Hidden Message)

Last week I attended the 56th conference of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association on the beautiful UBC campus in Vancouver, and was asked to give some closing remarks. I decided to capture the conference’s topic by creating a Wordle or Tag Cloud from the presentation titles that shows more frequent words in a larger font. After doing the best I could to combine French and English words, here is the resulting Wordle (click to see a larger version):

So what are industrial relations scholars researching? The big words capture the central areas of the field: work, workers, and jobs. But lots of disciplines research work. The particular expertise that industrial relations brings is on the role of institutions in shaping work outcomes, and we can see these traditional topics front and center, too: labor unions, law, policy, institutions, and regulation. Bargaining, collective, and global are also words that appeared multiple times on the agenda.

But industrial relations isn’t only about labor unions, collective bargaining, and laws. They are harder to spot because of the smaller font associated with fewer representations on the agenda, but some human resources and organizational behavior topics are also present, such as selection, mindfulness, organizational change, sales contests, stress, and job performance. And like other disciplines, industrial relations is not static. We are confronted with new theories, methodologies, and practices that we must grapple with. So unfortunately for this Wordle approach, in some ways the most interesting words are the smallest in that they reflect emergent topics, including: robotization, the gig economy, platforms, Uberizing, Twitter, industry 4.0, guaranteed basic income, cannabis, and others.

Industrial relations also embraces comparative research. So for a Canadian association’s conference in which most of the attendees are Canadian, it’s not surprising that the largest geography-related words are Canada and Québec, with British Columbia and Ontario also make appearances. But if you look carefully, you can see a large array of other countries and regions that provide the setting for the research that was presented, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Italy, Syria, Australia, Bangladesh, and China.

Here is the upper-right quadrant of the Wordle so that you can get a better view.

And if you look closely, hopefully you can see what I can see… (click here if the animation doesn't work or to see the final result)

That’s right…efficiency, equity, and voice are also (or should be) central constructs in industrial relations. I presented this at the conference as somewhat of an inside joke because I developed the trilogy of efficiency, equity, and voice along with the accompanying triangle imagery in my first book, Employment with a Human Face. So it was nice for my ego when the big reveal led to a great audience reaction as they associated this with my book.

But there’s a serious point here. Far too often, industrial relations can study and support institutions without really questioning what they are trying to achieve. For example, the traditional approach to studying U.S. labor relations often focuses on an uncritical exploration of how the existing labor processes work: how unions are organized, how contracts are negotiated, and how disputes and grievances are resolved. But what’s missing is the why. Industrial relations processes and institutions are simply a means to more fundamental ends or objectives. What are these objectives? Under what conditions are collectively bargained work rules a desirable or undesirable method for achieving these objectives? In the 21st century world of work, are there better ways of pursuing these objectives? These are the central and engaging questions of industrial relations.

This begins with explicitly defining the objectives of the employment relationship. As I wrote in Employment with a Human Face (p. 180),

Because work is a fully human activity, employees are entitled to fair treatment and opportunities to have input into decisions that affect their daily lives. In other words, equity and voice should be added to efficiency as the fundamental objectives of the employment relationship. Efficiency, equity, and voice are therefore the key analytical dimensions for studying the employment relationship. The study of employment—human resources and industrial relations—is the analysis of the contributions of individuals, markets, institutions, organizational strategies, and public policies toward the employment relationship objectives of efficiency, equity, and voice.

To me, this is point of industrial relations as an academic enterprise. Which then connects to a related normative agenda. Again quoting from Employment with a Human Face (p. 181),

The modern employment relationship and the corporation are purposeful human constructs. Humans have always had to work to survive, but modern employment—working for someone else in a limited-liability corporation—is a creation of society. In that corporations are created rather than natural institutions, society must determine their ends and the rights and obligations that accompany the modern employment relationship—they are not preordained, natural, or beyond control. Achievement of economic prosperity, respect for human dignity [and identity], and equal appreciation for the competing human rights of property rights and labor rights require that efficiency, equity, and voice be balanced. The question for research, policy, and practice is therefore how to structure the employment relationship—how to govern the workplace—to achieve this balance.

As seen by the topics presented at CIRA, these questions are the continuing concern of traditional subjects in industrial relations as well as new applications to emergent topics as the world of work continues to change and evolve.

The IR Curmudgeon's View on Identity in Employment Relations

This past weekend I was at an ILR Review-sponsored conference “Toward New Theories in Employment Relations.” A predictable theme was the gig economy. But more interesting were repeated themes of the importance of ideas (whether from the bottom up rooted in individual cognition (a paper I presented) or from the top down in the form of contested ideologies) and the importance of identity. Identity politics, of course, are everywhere today, even in superhero movies (Black Panther).

This presents a particular challenge for employment relations because traditional scholarship has emphasized material interests rather than identity needs, and traditional institutions (especially labor unions) have been organized around materialistic class interests rather than (non-class) identities. That is, workers are portrayed simply as workers, not women, Latinxs, and the like. 

Or at least that’s how the traditional perspective is now painted. In my view, this simplification of the past is more accurate for industrial relations scholarship than practice.

That is, scholarship has seen workers as generic in theory, but in practice it's a different story: real workers and institutions have been anything but blind to identity issues. Indeed, it would have been better if they were. Go back 100+ years and many AFL craft unions were discriminatory and openly hostile toward anyone except white men. The Pullman Company trained African American workers for skilled positions to keep the skilled labor force divided by racial tension. Worker solidarity across occupations was also weakened through racial and gender segregation—on Pullman cars, for example, conductors were always white and porters were always black; men cleaned the exterior of the railroad cars, women the interior. So when appreciating the importance of identity in today’s worker centers—as just one example—we should not overlook the importance of racial identity in the struggles and victories of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters all the way back in the 1920s led by A. Philip Randolph and others (this is captured by the movie “10,000 Black Men Named George”).

This is not to deny that identity has become both more central and more complex in contemporary society—and therefore in contemporary employment relations practice. So continuing to deepen the theorizing and evidence around identity issues in employment relations is needed. But I think this will be most productive if we see this as building on past practice, and even on past scholarship, rather than as something that is seen as a break from the past. 

OK, I will admit that I have self-interested reasons for believing this. In particular, in a recent blog post I (selfishly) argued that my trilogy of efficiency, equity, and voice continues to be a powerful way to capture the key objectives of the employment relationship. Some might see these as more materialistic and as ignoring identity issues. Indeed, in my own presentation of efficiency, equity, and voice I have not explicitly recognized identity concerns. But I assert that the framework of efficiency, equity, and voice is flexible enough to include shifting conceptualizations of these interests. 

Moreover, while identity is different from interests, I think the way that identity concerns are realized and satisfied in the employment relationship is through (a) being treated in desired ways consistent with one’s identity demands, and (b) being able to express yourself in ways consistent with your desired identity. The first of these falls under the category of equity, the second under the category of voice. Put differently, in the context of the employment relations, violations of individuals' and groups' identity needs by discriminating against certain groups and by repressing expressions of that identity are violations of equity and voice in the employment relationship. 

Indeed, both equity and voice as key objectives of the employment relationship stem from the essential qualities of being human, which, in turn, means that workers as humans are entitled to dignity and self-determination. Identity is an essential part of dignity and self-determination, and hence of equity and voice. So even in this era dominated by identity politics and identity theorizing, the key goals of the employment relationship remain efficiency, equity, and voice. In the future, I will try to do a better job of explicitly noting the identity aspects of equity and voice.

So let’s continue to seek ways to deepen our understandings of identity within employment relations theorizing and practice. But personally I think it’s most productive to do so in ways that build on rather than reject where we’ve come from. And that preserves my own desired sense of identity…

Employment with a Human Face: Delivered on Christmas, Enduring as a Teenager

I just received news that my first book—Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice—will be translated and published in Turkish. I have Dr. Fuat Man, a professor of HRM at Sakarya University to thank for this, and I’m particularly grateful and honored because he has already translated my The Thought of Work (Çalışma Düşüncesi). For personal reasons, I often think about Employment with a Human Face around the holidays (I’ll return to this below), and this news about a Turkish language edition has magnified these reflections.

I can’t believe that it’s been 14 years since Employment with a Human Face was published. It’s now a full-fledged teenager! How is it holding up? Here are the first two paragraphs of the book:

Employment is a critical feature of modern society. The nature of employment determines the quality of individuals’ lives, the operation of the economy, the viability of democracy, and the degree of respect for human dignity. It is therefore essential that modern society establish societal goals for employment. Economic prosperity demands that employment be productive, but should economic performance be the sole standard of the employment relationship? No. Work is not simply an economic transaction; respect for the importance of human life and dignity requires that the fair treatment of workers also be a fundamental standard of the employment relationship—as are the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. Furthermore, the importance of self-determination for both human dignity and democracy mandate employee input and participation in work-related decisions that affect workers’ lives. In short, the objectives of the employment relationship are efficiency, equity, and voice. This book is about these objectives, and the alternative ways in which they can be achieved.

In some situations, efficiency, equity, and voice are mutually reinforcing. A productive workforce provides the economic resources for equitable working conditions that include employee voice in decision making. And equitable treatment and employee participation can provide the avenues for reducing turnover, increasing employee commitment, and harnessing workers’ ideas for improving productivity and quality. But the more important question is: What should happen when efficiency, equity, and voice conflict with each other? This is the critical question that makes the analysis of the employment relationship a dynamic topic with diverse perspectives. Should efficiency—and the closely related property rights of employers—automatically trump equity and voice concerns? Or should the reverse be true—should equity and voice have priority over efficiency needs? Neither of these extreme options is preferable; rather, a democratic society should seek to balance efficiency, equity, and voice. The power of free economic markets to provide efficiency and economic prosperity is important and should be encouraged, but respect for human dignity and democratic ideals further require that the power of economic markets be harnessed to serve the quality of human life and provide broadly shared prosperity. As such, the imperative for the drivers of employment—individuals, markets, institutions, organizational strategies, and public policies—is to provide employment with a human face—which I define as a productive and efficient employment relationship that also fulfills the standards of human rights. The International Labour Organization (1999) calls this simply “decent work.”

Maybe I’m biased, but I think this is as true as ever. Indeed, in recent years there has been an increased recognition of the deep importance of work, which magnifies the need to think seriously about the goals of the employment relationship, imbalances in this relationship, and to reject pure commodification and efficiency approaches. And there remains a pressing need to strive for a better balance in the workplace and in our societies. In fact, I just received a press release from the World Inequality Lab that confirms the tremendous increase in inequality that has occurred over the last few decades around the world, and calls for “more ambitious policies to democratize access to education and well-paying jobs in rich and emerging countries alike.” In other words, we need to actively strive for a better balance between efficiency, equity, and voice in and out of the workplace, even though this can be difficult, it requires institutional innovation, and there are diverse perspectives on how to best achieve this.

Since the time I wrote Employment with a Human Face, there has been increased thinking around citizenship rights as an alternative to human rights. Although the differences can be subtle, citizenship rights stem from membership in a human community such as a nation, rather than from being part of overall humanity, and thereby more clearly place obligations on the nation to provide citizenship rights. Moreover, whereas human rights are seen as universal, citizens have obligations as well as rights; so characterizing workers’ rights as citizenship rights rather than human rights also makes it easier to allow for workers’ interests such as equity and voice to be balanced with other objectives such as efficiency. The teenage Employment with a Human Face could be slightly more nuanced that the original by connecting equity and voice to citizenship rights rather than focusing on a human rights narrative. 

But in either case, I think the imperative is clear. I started with the introduction, and I can close with the book’s concluding passage, to which the teenage Employment with a Human Face would also add pressures from financialization as further impetus for new thinking and new policies:

Public discourse that emphasizes competitive markets, efficiency, and marginal productivity justice; the frequent lack of appreciation for employee voice; the continued turbulence of the 21st century workplace; the focus of employment research on the operation of the existing processes (often solely with efficiency in mind); and the need for “explicitly recognizing the role of moral choices in the labor market” (Osterman et al., 2001, 12) all make it imperative to ground the study of employment in the objectives of the employment relationship—efficiency, equity, and voice. This grounding provides the basis for a fuller understanding of all aspects of the employment relationship, including the alternative behaviors, strategies, institutions, and public policies for balancing efficiency, equity, and voice. From such analyses can come workplace governance practices and systems that fulfill the economic and human needs of a democratic society and foster broadly shared prosperity.

And if you are curious about why I often think about Employment with a Human Face around the holidays, here is my story. The very first copy of the book (so the very first copy of any book I had written), was delivered to my home on Christmas Eve in 2003. But no one heard the delivery person. My wife and I were up late getting things ready for Christmas morning. At around 1 in the morning (so it actually is Christmas by this point) a light snow is falling and for some reason I opened our front door, and a package falls into our front entry. Completely unexpectedly it was the very first copy of Employment with a Human Face. I won’t go so far as to say that it was a Christmas miracle because that would cheapen the significance of the holiday season, but it was a touching moment, complete with a gentle snow on an otherwise still night, that I will always remember.

Happy Holidays, and may your 2018 be filled with efficiency, equity, and voice.

Update (May 2018): Upon further reflection, a teenage Employment with a Human Face should also explicitly demonstrate that equity and voice include identity concerns.

The Unique CTUL-Target Partnership: Filling a Vacuum

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a roundtable event sponsored by the Workers Lab that focused on the CTUL-Target partnership. CTUL (Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha which translates to The Center of Workers United in Struggle) is a Minneapolis worker center that, to quote from its own mission statement, “organizes low-wage workers from across the Twin Cities to develop leadership and educate one another to build power and lead the struggle for fair wages, better working conditions, basic respect, and a voice in our workplaces.” Worker centers have emerged in many cities over the past decade to try to improve working conditions outside the parameters of traditional labor law and traditional labor unionism, particularly for workers who fall in gray areas of labor law. For example, the cleaning of retail stores is commonly contracted out to third-party contractors so it is difficult to establish a collective bargaining relationship with the retail chain because technically the janitors do not work for the retailer.

As the result of a fortuitous set of factors, CTUL and Target have formed a unique worker center-corporate partnership that is highlighted by the development and adoption of Target’s Responsible Contractor Policy. There are many aspects of this story worth telling, and CTUL’s website has a lot of information. At a high level, I think it’s a fascinating model. It’s not abdication to the vagaries of the market or one side or the other finding a way to dictate its agenda. It’s not a central authority trying to find one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather, it’s a way of creating dialogue among the parties most affected, finding common interests, and striking a balance on challenging issues for which they have conflicting goals. In other words, it’s a new institutional way to create what I’ve called “Employment with a Human Face” by balancing central employer and employee objectives (such as efficiency, equity, and voice).

As I listened to representatives of CTUL, Target, and TakeAction Minnesota describe their roles in this partnership, two things struck me. One, to have a successful partnership requires not just shifting power so that low-paid, immigrant and minority workers have some influence, but it also requires shifting mental models and mindsets. For this to be a productive partnership, Target had to shift from a defensive posture that saw CTUL’s criticism of abusive working conditions by Target’s janitorial services contractors as an attack, to an opportunity for listening, understanding, and ultimately, valuable community engagement. And CTUL had to be willing to adopt a partnership rather than conflictual mindset, too. As I’ve often written and taught about, ideas are important.

The other broad theme that struck me comes down to one word: vacuum. By contracting out its janitorial work, Target had essentially created a legal vacuum where it’s difficult for workers to effectively enforce their legal rights—the avoidance of wage theft, the presence of a safe workplace and workers’ compensation coverage, and the ability to unionize if desired. CTUL essentially filled this vacuum and shifted Target’s terrain of compliance. Because of the vacuum, Target didn’t have a traditional legal compliance concern and could ignore the janitor’s plight, but CTUL raised the specter of negative publicity for Target. So while lawsuits were perhaps not a concern (the traditional focus of corporate “compliance”), harms to the corporate brand became a concern. And Target responded. But this was prompted by a legal vacuum that in simpler times would have been filled by the enforcement of employment and labor law.

Another aspect to this vacuum was connected to remarks by TakeAction Minnesota, a community organizing coalition of progressive organizations. TakeAction Minnesota said that it had learned from CTUL that transformational shifts aren’t about a single issue win or just getting to the table, they are about shifting power, dealing directly with employers, getting a deal with enforcement mechanisms, and recognizing that there won’t be agreement on every single issue. Wait a minute, this is classic industrial relations thinking, and labor law promotes labor unions for exactly these reasons. But for whatever reason, unions are unable to be successful in certain sectors. A vacuum has been created, and it was striking to me that without even realizing the parallel, TakeAction Minnesota was highlighting exactly what unions used to do. In the areas of the economy with such vacuums, new organizations like CTUL and new partnerships like the one with Target are needed in order to create employment with a human face, and to create employment relationships that are WIN-WIN-WIN: relationships that serve workers and their families (win #1), organizations (win #2), and society (win #3).

Update: On October, 13, 2016, CTUL announced that 600 retail janitors who clean Target, Macy’s and Best Buy stores in the Twin Cities would begin collective bargaining with the janitorial contractors. CTUL's campaign led the contractors to agree to a trigger mechanism in which they would bargain a contract after 60% of the janitors in the area's 300 big box retail stores unionized, a threshold that has now been reached. This story has been covered by the StarTribune, The Guardian, and Workday Minnesota.  

‘We’re All in This Together’: The Multi-Stakeholder Imperative for Healthy, Balanced Employment Relationships

Last month I had the pleasure of participating in a European Union (EU) Presidency event in Riga, Latvia, organized by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) in cooperation with the Latvian Saeima (Parliament). Eurofound is an agency of the European Union whose mission is to provide information, advice, and expertise that helps create better living and working conditions in Europe. Visiting Riga was a fascinating cultural experience, and this was magnified by being the only full-time academic on the event’s program and the only non-European in attendance.

The event marked the launch of Eurofound’s 3rd European Company Survey Overview Report. Consistent with this and with the “Competitive Europe” priority of the Latvian EU Presidency, the theme of the day was “Workplace practices: Creating win-win arrangements for companies and employees” (in Latvian, “Darba organizācija: Uzņēmumam un tā darbiniekiem piemērotu modeļu meklējumos”). Videos are available in this Saeima news release.

The theme of my remarks was “‘We’re All in This Together’: The Multi-Stakeholder Imperative for Healthy, Balanced Employment Relationships.” Trying to create win-win employment relationships has been going on for at least 2,000 years. This suggests that it’s important, but also difficult. Otherwise, we either would have given up by now, or figured it all out! So why is this so important? From my perspective, it’s because the best employment relationships will be win-win-win: they serve workers and their families (win #1), organizations (win #2), and society (win #3). Moreover, the benefits from healthy employment relationships are far-reaching, and include economic gains, physical and psychological health, civic and political participation, and social inclusivity. This requires balancing multiple objectives in the employment relationship (objectives that I simplify as efficiency, equity, and voice).

But why is this so hard to achieve? The event participants indicated a number of reasons, but as the lone academic on the program, I highlighted the importance of ideas. Creating win-win employment relationships, designing effective human resources practices, and crafting supportive public policies are not just about the specific practices involved in those important actions, they are also about the mental models, frames of reference, or ideologies that support those practices. And not all ideas about the employment relationship support the pursuit of balanced relationships. Approaches that are firmly rooted in whatever the market will bear are more about organizational interests; approaches grounded in critical thinking prioritize worker interests. We need HR professionals, worker advocates, and policy makers to embrace ideologies that seek to align employer and employee interests while respecting both sets of interests as legitimate. So again, we don’t just need the “right” practices, we also need the right ideas behind them.

I’m also beginning some research with colleagues from the University of Newcastle in Australia as to why it’s so easy to deviate from the “right” practices and mental mindsets. It requires hard work to avoid slipping away from these ideals, but I’ll save that for another posting.

In conclusion, the parties to the employment relationship need to work hard to make it healthy, win-win, and balanced, and to sustain these win-win-win employment relationships. So they need support from many sources, including insights from Eurofound’s European Company Survey. And they also need to be mindful not only of their practices, but also about their ideologies.

Why HR-OB Still Needs IR

Professor John Godard of the University of Manitoba has just published a very stimulating article that should be read by anyone in employment relations, human resource management, and organizational behavior ("The Psychologisation of Employment Relations?," Human Resource Management Journal, 2014). I have witnessed the trends that John describes--indeed, in my administrative roles at the University of Minnesota I have, with mixed feelings, contributed to some of them--and I share his concerns.

In this posting, I want to expand upon what he raises in this quote:

the growing psychologisation of employment relations means that there is less and less possibility for actually understanding these relations. The problems of motivation and control, and the dysfunctions to which they may give rise, tend to be attributed to individual or interpersonal phenomena that can be avoided through careful selection and training/socialisation procedures if not more directly through 'performance management'. Often, the assumption is not that these practices and innovations are flawed, or that it is the institutional design of the employment relation that is the problem, but rather that they are just not being implemented properly. (p. 7)

For starters, I think this particular problem is even worse than Godard conveys it. To see this, we need to distinguish between a human resources (HR) approach and an organizational behavior (OB) approach. The HR approach (or what some might see as a high-road, high-commitment HR approach) uses organizational policies and practices to align employee-employer interests to boost performance. In this paradigm, problems of subpar performance are assumed to reflect poorly-designed policies or flawed implementation. Sometimes the blame might be ascribed to employees (e.g., the organization selected the wrong kind of individual), but there is at least the scope for questioning whether the policies were appropriately designed, which means that there is some scope for questioning the underlying, structural nature of the employment relationship (albeit in limited ways, more on this in a minute).

But increasingly within academia (at least in North America), I assert that this HR approach is being supplanted by an OB approach that seeks to manage interpersonal dynamics, not organizational policies and practices, to boost performance. In this paradigm, subpar performance or other negative outcomes are largely seen as the product of interpersonal dysfunction among co-workers or between a worker and her manager. In this way of thinking, organizational policies such as selection systems or compensation plans are largely off the radar so there is even less cause for considering them than in the HR approach. So there is even less of a chance that the structural nature of the employment relationship will be considered.

In contrast, industrial relations perspectives focus attention on power relations between employers and employees as shaped by the allocation of resources and rights in modern capitalist societies. Problems of motivation and performance, then, might be rooted in systematic inequalities which in turn raise questions about the structural nature of the employment relationship. It is typically through industrial relations scholarship and coursework, then, that one confronts--or should confront--alternative models of the employment relationship, such as unitarism and pluralism (see my earlier blog posting). Industrial relations perspectives are therefore critically important for understanding employment relations and need to remain an important part of the field.

But there is another element to this story. Not only does the psychologization of employment relations draw attention to certain private policies and practices and away from public policies and institutions (notably protective labor standards and labor unions because their need is rooted in structural power imbalances not commonly recognized in the HR and OB approaches). But it also implicitly focuses attention on certain outcomes and objectives of the employment relationship--primarily economic performance and psychological well-being. As I show in my book Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice, industrial relations perspectives embrace broader objectives of the employment relationship that I term equity (fair employment standards for both material outcomes and personal treatment) and voice (the ability to have meaningful input into decisions). In the industrial relations tradition, equity and voice are key objectives rooted in human dignity and citizenship, even when they don't enhance employee or organizational performance. So this causes us to question the nature of employment relationship on a broader basis. In other words, concerns with low pay or a lack of employee voice, for example, are problematic in industrial relations thought, but perhaps not in HR and OB as long as employees are satisfied and productive--and IR scholarship looks to the structural nature of the employment relationship as at least partly responsible for these problematic outcomes.

So the psychologization of employment relations makes it less likely that the nature of the employment relationship will be questioned not only because when there are problems, the blame will placed on specific policies or individuals (Godard's point), but also because the scope of important outcomes is narrower. Putting this a little differently, OB generally concerns itself with individual and team-level outcomes and HR highlights organizational outcomes; IR adds a concern with societal outcomes.

With that said, I want to be clear that I have great respect for the OB scholarship pursued by my University of Minnesota colleagues and others in the field. So the problem isn't with this scholarship per se, the problem, as I see it, is when one perspective becomes the sole approach to understanding the very complex world of work. The house of employment relations scholarship needs to be large enough to include diverse intellectual paradigms, adherents to different paradigms need to respect and learn from others, and the degree programs we offer need to educate students in diverse ways of thinking, even if some of these ways might seem a little old-fashioned. HR-OB still needs industrial relations.