Documents Lamare, J. Ryan 11 results

" With the maturation of strategic human resource management scholarship, there appears to be a greater call to move from monolithic workforce management to a more strategic and differentiated emphasis on employees with the greatest capacity to enhance competitive advantage. There has been little consideration in the literature as to whether organizations formally identify key groups of employees based on their impact on organizational learning and core competences. Using survey evidence from 260 multinational companies (MNCs), this paper explores the extent to which key groups of employees are formally recognized and whether they are subject to differential compensation practices. The results demonstrate that just in excess of half of these MNCs identify a key group. There was considerable differentiation in the compensation practices between these key groups, managers and the largest occupational group in the workforce. The results give rise to questions worthy of future investigation, namely whether the differentiated approaches used lead to improved performance outcomes."

"Unions influence the U.S. political process in numerous ways. Although scholarship has examined labor's effects on political office-holding, less research is available on the relationship between unions and legislator policy choice. In this article, I use theories of social identification, civic engagement, and intergenerational transfer of political values to explore the relationship between various definitions of a legislator's prior union experience and his or her roll-call voting once in office. I employ multilevel mixed-effects regressions to analyze 2,427 federal and statewide worker-related votes cast by California's legislators from 1999 to 2012. Results indicate that higher probabilities of having worked in a unionized occupation or having a family member who belonged to a union are positively associated with voting for union-supported issues. The relationship is not cumulative, however, and is moderated by factors both endogenous and exogenous to the legislator."

"This introductory article to the special issue insists on the need to examine the specific processes and means by which transnational corporations are currently establishing and increasing their power in society. Understanding power and politics in and around multinational corporations requires conceptual and empirical approaches able to address their transnational character, with their action embedded in multiple institutional environments, with hierarchies linking distant headquarters and subsidiaries and involving numerous actors with diverse interests, and with differing industrial relations contexts. Articles in this issue address three key questions: how do transnational corporations leverage their characteristics and organization in support of their own power? How do they interact with the different institutional environments in which they operate, and what power relations do these interactions imply? To what extent do they have the capacity to determine and apply their own rules, independently of established institutional regulations?"

"The relationships among employee representation, formal union status, and employer strategies within and across institutional regimes offer a variegated landscape in the context of globalization. Key questions remain as to the relative weight of macro- and micro-level influences on union status at subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs). This study analyzes data gathered through coordinated surveys of MNC subsidiaries in Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom and tests the extent to which union status and double-breasting depend on home-country variation, host-country influences, and particular organizational characteristics. The authors find support for a combination of effects on both union status and double-breasting. Further analyses test explicit variations on union status within each host context and support arguments that effects depend on the particularities of national industrial relations regimes"

"In this article we analyze the outcomes of nearly 3200 awards issued in employment disputes settled by arbitration in the securities industry over the period 1986–2008. The large amount of litigation in the securities industry alleging discrimination by securities firms against the women they employ led us to hypothesize that women would do less well than men in these arbitration cases. Regression analysis reveals that the gender of the complainant and the complainant's attorney (but not the gender of the respondent's attorney or the arbitrator) had significant effects on the size of the awards. Regardless of the definition of the dependent variable, female complainants did less well than male complainants in these employment arbitration cases. In most estimates, the gender of the attorney representing the complainant also affected the size of the award: male attorneys obtained larger awards than female attorneys. We conclude that these gender differentials are more likely to be the consequence of employment conditions in the securities industry rather than biases in the arbitration process."

"A worker's decision whether or not to support union organizing remains a critical and timely issue for American workers. We draw on the union organizing, organizational psychology, and social dilemma literatures to offer new insight into a worker's decision whether or not to support union organizing efforts. In particular, we highlight three specific conditions – social uncertainty, environmental uncertainty, and exposure – that make the decision whether or not to support union organizing a social dilemma, and describe how these should be expected to vary by union organizing stage. We also examine the effects of key contingencies: management opposition that exacerbates, and strategic union efforts that counteract, the effects of social dilemmas. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of viewing union organizing from a social dilemma perspective "

" This article empirically examines whether employment discrimination claims differ from other types of disputes resolved through arbitration. Whether arbitration is appropriate for resolving violations of anti-discrimination statutes at work is a focus of ongoing policy debates. Yet empirical scholarship has rarely considered whether different types of complaints might have distinct characteristics and receive varied outcomes in arbitration. The authors analyze all of the employment arbitration awards for cases filed between 1991 and 2006 in the financial services industry to determine whether differences in the type of allegation affect award outcomes. They also examine the effects of the financial industry's decision in 1999 to introduce voluntary arbitration for discrimination claims. Results indicate that discrimination claims largely fared worse in arbitration than did other statutory or non-statutory claims but that arbitration systems are capable of meaningful self-reform."

"Among the many factors that can influence patterns of trade union membership, coverage, and influence, the importance of a country's political system has been largely overlooked by industrial relations scholars except for the ruling or governing ideology. We uniquely theorize three channels through which the structural, not ideological, nature of a country's political system can shape unionization in the workplace: incentives for inclusionary governance, legislative body composition, and policy enactment. Empirically, we use multiple European data sets to test the relationship between political and employee representation using multivariate analyses across more than 25 countries. We find that increased political representativeness, measured by lower disproportionality and the presence of multiparty coalitions, is a statistically significant predictor of a greater likelihood of individual trade union membership, coverage, and influence, while competitive fragmentation, measured by greater numbers of political parties, is associated with weakened collective voice."

"This article examines the strategic underpinnings of firms' use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices. The authors argue that a firm's strategic orientation and commitment to ADR shape its adoption of dispute resolution techniques—such as mediation and arbitration. Firms vary in the benefits they seek to gain from adopting ADR practices, and firm-level use is affected by these anticipated benefits. The authors also propose a link between a firm's commitment to the diffusion, access, and their use of ADR, on the one hand, and employee usage on the other. They test their theory using survey data from Fortune 1000 corporations and identify four distinct strategic orientations toward ADR, which in turn help to explain use of ADR within firms. Finally, they also find that a firm's commitment to ADR is also shown to affect the firm's use of mediation and arbitration."

"Conventional wisdom holds that hiring an attorney will improve outcomes for non-union employees who take individual rights complaints to arbitration. The limited empirical scholarship on this topic, however, rarely accounts for the concurrent influence of employer representatives or for differences in attorney characteristics. The author analyzes all arbitration awards rendered within the securities industry for cases filed at the implementation of its ADR program through 2007. Findings show that hiring an attorney benefits employees, but only in the rare instances when employers do not include an agent. In addition, the author examines lawyers' biographical records to determine attorney quality differences and their effects on outcomes conditional on both sides having legal counsel. Findings show that employee and employer attorney characteristics differ and have grown more pronounced over time. These differences can affect awards, particularly to the benefit of employees. The author concludes that although simply hiring any attorney will not redress systematic imbalances within employment arbitration, lawyers are important to the system and certain types of representatives can affect the outcomes of arbitration."