Documents Stern, Robert N. 6 results

"Indirect worker participation in corporate policy decisions is occurring through worker and union representation on boards of directors and supervisory boards in Europe, Australia, and the United States. Evidence suggests that this form of representation is problematic because of the structure of corporate boards, selection and training of worker directors, dual loyalty-role conflict problems, confidentiality constraints, and communication with constituents. In the United States, worker directorships arise at the corporate level because of concession bargaining and employee ownership. However, U.S. corporate and labor laws raise questions over the legal status of union board memberships. Several U.S. cases are compared with foreign experiences. The assessment of the effectiveness of worker directorships as a form of participation varies dramatically based on the orientations of researchers as unitarist, pluralist, or conflict theorists."

"The study examines worker representation on boards of directors as a form of employee participation in organizational decision-making in 14 U.S. firms in the early 1980s. The authors develop a model of worker director role definitions and role performance to explain how opposition by managers and conventional board directors to labor advocacy on the board can make worker directorships ineffective labor voice mechanisms when other structures of participation are absent in a firm. The analysis shows that corporate managers and workers had widely divergent definitions of the worker director role: management emphasized downward communication from the board to employees, whereas worker directors and their constituents stressed the protection of workers' interests as the main function of worker directors. Both management and labor influenced worker role definitions and role behavior through selection and socialization processes."