Documents Teague, Paul 36 results

"This paper reviews the emergence of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Ireland and examines the incidence in firms of ADR practices addressing individual and group grievances and disputes. The paper reveals the limited diffusion to date of ADR practices and shows that the uptake of ADR is associated with the degree to which firms have adopted high-commitment HRM practices. Organizations that place importance on developing people-centred HRM policies are more likely to be disposed to adopting state-of-the-art conflict management practices designed to solve workplace problems quickly and fairly."

"The issue of concession bargaining between employers and unions during the Great Recession has received little attention in the research literature. This article presents a systematic analysis of the conduct of concession bargaining during the recession in Ireland in the context of three forms of concession bargaining identified in the international literature: integrative concession bargaining, distributive concession bargaining and ultra concession bargaining – each with different but overlapping sets of institutional foundations and implications for employers and trade unions. Drawing on focus groups of managers and union officials and a representative survey of employers, the article shows that distributive concession bargaining has been the predominant form in the Irish recession. This form of concession bargaining is likely to have few lasting direct effects on employer or union roles in collective bargaining but nevertheless appears to have significant indirect implications for the silent marginalization of unions in workplaces. "

"From 1987 to 2009, Irish social partnership operated as a national framework for industrial relations. The contribution of the article is twofold. We seek to link the institutional dynamics of social partnership with the Régulation School's notions of modes of accumulation and regimes of régulation. This framework is used to explain the rise and fall of social partnership in Ireland. We argue that the regime of social partnership in Ireland can be divided into two distinct periods. In the first, social partnership contributed positively to a benign productivity-led mode of accumulation. In the second, it lost its economic functionality due mostly to financialisation taking a grip in the Irish economy. The conclusion is that social partnership had both positive and negative features, but it is unlikely to be repeated in the foreseeable future, at least not in Ireland."

"This paper presents the first comprehensive review and assessment of Ireland's influential 15-year experiment with workplace partnership. The paper reviews the outcomes of workplace partnership and explains the limited adoption of partnership in the private and public sectors, drawing on the authors' experiences as participants in policy initiatives concerned with promoting partnership in the workplace. Although the promotion of partnership was to the fore in public policy between the late 1990s to the onset of the recession and successful outcomes were reported for the main stakeholders where partnerships were established, the paper explains why the concept nevertheless remained largely unappealing across the private and public sectors."

"New ways of managing conflict are increasingly important features of work and employment in organizations. In the book the world's leading scholars in the field examine a range of innovative alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices, drawing on international research and scholarship and covering both case studies of major exemplars and developments in countries in different parts of the global economy. Developments in the management of individual and collective conflict at work are addressed, as are innovations in both unionized and non-union organizations and in the private and public sectors.

New practices for managing conflict in organizations are set in the context of trends in workplace conflict and perspectives on how conflict should be understood and addressed. Part 1 examines the changing context of conflict management by addressing the main frameworks for understanding conflict management, the trend in conflict at work, developments in employment rights, and the influence of HRM on conflict management. Part 2 covers the main approaches to conflict management in organizations, addressing both conventional and alternative approaches to conflict resolution. Conventional grievance handling and third-party processes in conflict resolution are examined as well as the main ADR practices, including conflict management in non-union firms, the role of the organizational ombudsman, mediation, interest-based bargaining, line and supervisory management, and the concept of conflict management systems. Part 3 presents case studies of exemplars and innovators in the field, covering mediation in the US postal service, interest-based bargaining at Kaiser-Permanente, 'med-arb' in the New Zealand Police, and judicial mediation in UK employment tribunals. Part 4 covers international developments in conflict management in Germany, Japan, The United States, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and China.
This Handbook gives a comprehensive overview of this growing field, which has seen an huge increase in programmes of study in university business and law schools and in executive education programmes. "

"Two contrasting views tend to dominate the literature on the impact of recessions on employment. One view is that recessions amount to a ‘critical conjuncture' for work and employment systems, a time when firms try to transform radically existing employment models. The alternative perspective is that firms, constrained mostly by the forces of path dependency, seek to adjust to the immediate or short-term pressures of the recession but otherwise maintain the established way of organizing the employment relationship. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this literature by reporting the findings of a major study of the effects of the recession on work and employment in firms based in Ireland. The main finding to emerge from the study is that firms mostly have made improvised adaptations in response to the crisis and have shied away from far-reaching transformational strategies."

"Foreign-owned multinationals are a dominant feature of the Irish economy. Over the years, there has been an ongoing debate about whether or not the subsidiaries of these multinationals conform to established ‘Irish' approaches to the management of the employment relationship. One influential view is that non-union multinationals, particularly those of American origin, have transplanted a range of innovative human resource management (HRM) practices into the country, with the effect of helping to fragment the traditional industrial relations system in the country. Remarkably, little comprehensive evidence exists to support or bring into question this view. To address this shortcoming, this article reports the findings of research which investigates the conflict management strategies of 83 non-union multinationals. The main finding of this research is that most non-union multinationals are not transplanting innovative conflict management strategies into Ireland. We seek to explain this trend by suggesting that the longstanding tendency to categorise multinationals mainly into ‘ethnocentric' and ‘polycentric' (and sometimes geo-centric and regional-centric) organisations is not keeping pace with the growing sophistication of international strategic HRM: multinationals can pursue ‘ethnocentric' and ‘polycentric' HRM polices simultaneously. A ‘polycentric' approach was taken to the matter of conflict management as this HRM topic was not considered a strategic priority for non-union multinationals."

"Recently, alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices have gained increased exposure as a superior way of addressing workplace conflict. Several studies suggest that organizations in the USA have widely diffused some form of ADR. But uncertainty remains about whether this development is peculiar to the USA or whether it marks a more systemic shift in the way workplace conflict is addressed in organizations. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the debate about the importance of workplace ADR by examining the extent to which organizations based in Ireland have adopted ADR practices to address individual and group-based work problems. It also assesses the factors that influence the diffusion of ADR. The article finds that the diffusion of ADR practices has not been widespread in Ireland, with more innovation occurring in relation to ADR practices aimed at addressing group-based rather than individual-based workplace problems. US-ownership and high commitment HRM practices are found to be significant influences on the diffusion of ADR. "

"Employment tribunals were first established to provide a cheap and accessible service for the quick resolution of legally based employment disputes. With the decline of collective industrial relations and the growth of legislation on individual employment rights, employment tribunals have acquired a new prominence. However, in doing so employment tribunals have also been heavily criticized for becoming too legalistic and formal. This article takes issue with this tendency to criticize the work of employment tribunals. It closely investigates the role of the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) in Ireland and finds that while it has become legalistic it still plays an important role in employment standard-setting. The article argues that employment relations systems in Anglo-Saxon countries are increasingly rights-based and that bodies like the EAT now play a key role in the functioning of such systems. "