The Impact of Large-scale Employee Share Ownership Plans on Labour Productivity: The Case of Eircom

Large-scale Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs) have been a distinctive characteristic of Irish public enterprise reform, with shareholdings of 14.9 per cent being allocated to employees as part of firm restructuring and privatisation programmes. This paper presents a case study analysis of a large-scale ESOP in Eircom, Ireland’s former national telecommunications operator. We identify changes in labour productivity during the eight years before and after the establishment of the company’s ESOP and use a framework based on Pierce et al. (2001, 1991) to explore the role played by the ESOP. The ESOP was found to play a key role in enabling firm-level reform through concession bargaining and changes in employee relations, and thereby indirectly affecting labour productivity. However, despite the substantial shareholding and influence of the ESOP, we find it has failed to create a sense of psychological ownership among employees, and thereby further impact on productivit

Regulating for mutual gains? Non-union employee representation and the Information and Consultation Directive

Interest in ‘mutual gains’ has principally been confined to studies of the unionised sector. Yet there is no reason why this conceptual dynamic cannot be extended to the non-unionised realm, specifically in relation to non-union employee representation (NER). Although extant research views NER as unfertile terrain for mutual gains, the paper examines whether NER developed in response to the European Directive on Information and Consultation (I&C) of Employees may offer a potentially more fruitful route. The paper examines this possibility by considering three cases of NER established under the I&C Directive in Ireland, assessing the extent to which mutual gains were achieved

Insights from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service

In recent years, mediation has become increasingly popular as a means to resolve conflict. One important issue that arises out of the recent explosive growth in the practice of mediation is. what do mediators need to know in order to assist the parties in resolving their conflicts? This research attemtps to identify the determinants of mediator competence by examining the knowledge, skills and abilities of mediators in public sector labor relations. The research focuses on the core competencies requirements for mediators with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service and suggests which of the competencies may be applicable to mediation in other contexts.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Testing times: the development and sustainability of partnership relationships

Partnership literature in the UK fails to adequately develop theory. This study utilises social exchange theory as a theoretical lens and moves beyond rationale models of exchange to capture the conditions that foster reciprocity and how relations between the actors contribute to the sustainability of partnership or its collapse. By examining relationships at the individual level, this work provides evidence of the mechanisms that generate and drive partnerships. At the same time, the context, in this instance the National Health Service (NHS), demonstrates the significance of the interdependency between structural- (macro) and individual- (micro) level processes. The study followed a mixed-method case study design in four NHS acute trusts, drawing on in-depth interviews, focus groups, survey and documentary evidence. To enable a comparative analysis, views were sought from 31 management and trade union representatives and 543 employees were surveyed on their experiences of partnership. The study found that while the political will for partnership instigated the development of relationships, it was the commitment and enthusiasm of the key players and the perceived quality of relationships that developed and maintained partnership. Moreover, it concludes that without formalising these individual arrangements partnership would not be sustained over time

Union free-riding in Britain and New Zealand

The percentage of workers who choose not to join the union available to them at their workplace has been rising in Britain and New Zealand. Using comparable data for both countries this article shows factors such as perceptions of union instrumentality, the number of problems employees have at work, social custom, ideological convictions, and the costs of union joining all influence the propensity to free-ride. Employer-inspired policies substituting for unionization play no role. Having accounted for all these factors, free-riding remains more common in New Zealand than in Britain