Economic and Industrial Democracy

This article considers the workplace partnership–employee involvement nexus. While an empirical association has been recorded, there has been limited exploration of the potential benefits to be derived from the coupling of these interventions. Developing the idea of forward and reverse synergies this article argues the relationship is complex. The tendency for partnership to act as an antecedent for the utilization of employee involvement and wider organizational change has been documented – forward synergy. However, the reverse scenario, where involvement is used by management to initiate and subsequently bolster workplace cooperation and consensus has received far less scrutiny. This article seeks to shed light on both phenomena.

This article examines the antecedents of intentions to quit, job search and actual job switches during a follow-up period. The authors use a representative random sample of all Finnish employees. The data set both contains information on intentions to quit and on-the-job search from a cross-sectional survey and records employees’ actual job switches from longitudinal register data that can be linked to the survey. The authors study the contribution of adverse working conditions (harms, hazards, uncertainty and physically and mentally heavy work), work organization (promotion prospects, discrimination and supervisor support) and ease-of-movement factors (mental health, wage level). Adverse working conditions, poor promotion prospects, discrimination and mental health symptoms are positively related to unwillingly staying in a job, since these variables increase the probability of turnover intentions or job search but not actual job switches. These variables include both factors that push employees to job search and factors that make them less employable.

Union density and collective bargaining coverage is on a downwards trend in many developed countries, and this is evident in New Zealand. Some suggest this decline is resulting in traditional approaches to collective bargaining being replaced with a more collaborative style. This article empirically explores the nature of collective bargaining and examines the attitudes and behaviours of managerial negotiators, in the New Zealand environment, which has seen unions marginalized then recently afforded some degree of legitimacy. The study supports the traditional vs collaborative dichotomy, and the attitudes and behaviour comprising these styles is consistent with the literature and managerial self-reports.

Workplace bullying has often been attributed to work-related stress, and has been linked to the Job Demand Control Model. The current study aims to further these studies by testing the model for bullying in a heterogeneous sample and by using latent class (LC)-analyses to define different demands and control groups and targets of severe bullying. High job demands were associated with a higher probability of being a target of severe bullying, which was particularly true for the very high job demands group. Low job control was also associated with a higher probability of being a target of severe bullying. Moreover, high job control buffered the negative effects of job demands on being a target of severe bullying, particularly when employees reported very little job control and high/very high job demands. Overall, the JDC-Model was supported, suggesting that being a target of severe bullying can be considered as a social behavioural strain.

Research on job insecurity has traditionally focused on organizational consequences. The present study explores potential extraorganizational outcomes (employees’ consumption and life projects) of job insecurity in terms of both subjective perception and objective condition. Results are based on the secondary analysis of two large data sets: a tracking study with representative samples and a survey, both conducted on Italian employees. The findings suggest that job insecurity (especially the subjective perception, rather than the objective condition) may be associated with sacrifices of daily consumption (e.g. buying groceries, apparel, or entertainment) and life projects (e.g. buying a home, marrying, or having children).

The term ‘restriction of output’ is a basic category in research on resistance and organizational misbehaviour and it has many synonyms, but seems to lack antonyms. The term means, of course, that employees do less work than they are expected to by management. The opposite behaviour is in the management literature regarded as organization citizenship behaviour, a term with several synonyms as well as antonyms. This article argues that ‘expansion of output’ can be a form of organizational misbehaviour and an antonym to restriction of output. The study bases its argument on empirical findings from the public sector: workers doing more than they are expected to do in order to resist management control. A typology of different kinds of expansion of output is suggested.

This article examines the association between job satisfaction, flexible employment and job security among Turkish service sector workers. Data come from a survey of workers in banking and related sectors’ call centres, frontline five-star hotel staff and airline cabin crews (N = 407). Results show that flexible employment involving fixed-term contract, paid and unpaid overtime, on-call work and mismatched contract and hours are not associated with job satisfaction. Perceived job security is positively associated with job satisfaction. The study provides evidence that the perception of job security rather than flexible employment is an important contributor to job satisfaction for Turkish workers in the sample.

The present cross-sectional study aims to investigate (1) the direct effects of perceived organizational support and role overload on work–family conflict and (2) the mediating role of role overload in the relationship between perceived organizational support and work–family conflict using a Turkish sample. The hypotheses were tested with a sample of 344 employees from small and medium-sized enterprises in Turkey. The results demonstrated that perceived organizational support was negatively related to both family to work conflict and work to family conflict of the employees. Role overload was also positively related to both family to work conflict and work to family conflict. In addition, the results indicated that role overload did not have a mediating role between perceived organizational support and work–family conflict.

There is an ongoing sociological debate regarding which work activities can be considered ‘skilled’. In recent years, this debate has become increasingly controversial due to the growing prominence of so-called ‘soft skills’, especially when used in interactive service work. This article seeks to strengthen the conceptualization of soft skills, through case study investigation, to determine whether or not they are worthy of the ‘skilled’ label. An expanded notion of skill is supported, recognizing that in service contexts displaying employer-facilitated worker discretion and requirements for contextual knowledge in the use of soft skills, the term can indeed have real meaning.