Documents Conway, Neil 6 results

"This paper explores the apparent paradox that while unions exist to promote the interests and well-being of their members, UK survey evidence consistently shows that union members report lower levels of job satisfaction than non-union workers. A review and further analysis of the evidence confirms that this difference persists after controlling for other factors such as type of work. If union member dissatisfaction reflects a form of voice, then we might expect to see resulting gains. An analysis of data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey indicates that any gains are modest. Evidence is presented to suggest that although management has become less hostile to trade unions, a degree of anti-union sentiment remains, sometimes leading to a muffling of the union voice, and this helps to account for some of the union member dissatisfaction."

"Service profit chain and service climate research identifies the importance of employee attitudes and employee service behavior as mediating between organizational practices and customer satisfaction. While the importance of employee attitudes and customer service performance are acknowledged, there are calls to more precisely specify proximal mediators between employee attitudes and customer satisfaction. We propose a model in which the relationship between unit-level organizational commitment and customer attitudes is not direct but mediated via employees' customer service delivery including queuing time, serving time and service quality. We conducted a longitudinal unit-level analysis (N = 39) aggregating employee (N over 893) organizational commitment and customer (N over 1248) satisfaction data, and customer service behavior drawn from organizational records. Our model received reasonable support from basic tests of the predictive associations between unit-level organizational commitment, customer-relevant employee behaviors and customer satisfaction; however, organizational commitment was not found to be an important predictor in more rigorous change analyses. The findings as a whole therefore suggest that organizational commitment is a feature of units delivering fast, quality service, but its causal role is as yet unclear."

"The relationship between HRM and performance was explored in 366 UK companies using objective and subjective performance measures and cross-sectional and longitudinal data. Using objective measures of performance, greater use of HRM is associated with lower labour turnover and higher profit per employee but not higher productivity. After controlling for previous years' performance, the association ceases to be significant. Using subjective performance estimates, there is a strong association between HRM and both productivity and financial performance. The study therefore confirms the association between HRM and performance but fails to show that HRM causes higher performance."

"This paper investigates the effect of different forms of corporate governance on the structure and nature of stakeholder relationships within organizations and the consequent impact on human resource management (HRM) policy and outcomes. The analysis shows that while performance advantages can be derived from commitment-based HRM systems, a corporate governance regime that privileges remote stakeholders may operate as a constraint on such systems. The empirical analysis is based on the UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98)."

"We use data from the Relations Professionnelles et Négociations d'Entreprise survey of 2004 and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004 to analyse how far approaches to human resource management differ according to whether an establishment is part of a company with a stock exchange listing. In both countries we find that listing is positively associated with teamworking and performance-related pay, while in France, but not in Britain, it is also linked to worker autonomy and training. Our findings are inconsistent with the claim that shareholder pressure operates as a constraint on the adoption of high-performance workplace practices. The pattern is similar in the two countries, but with a slightly stronger tendency for listing to be associated with high-performance workplace practices in France."