Organizational career management practices. The role of the relationship between HRM and trade unions
| Date | 07 January 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-02-2018-0035 |
| Published date | 07 January 2019 |
| Pages | 84-100 |
| Author | Tomislav Hernaus,Dejana Pavlovic,Maja Klindzic |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
Organizational career
management practices
The role of the relationship between
HRM and trade unions
Tomislav Hernaus
Department of Organization and Management,
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb,
Zagreb, Croatia
Dejana Pavlovic
Institute of Economic Sciences, Belgrade, Serbia, and
Maja Klindzic
Department of Organization and Management,
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Purpose –Organizations profoundly create development paths of individual’s careers. Therefore, the
purpose of this paper is to gain understanding about how organizational context (shaped by the complex
relationship between trade union strength and HRM strength) influences the application of organizational
career management (OCM) practices seen through the lens of the theory of cooperation and competition
(Deutsch, 1949; Tjosvold, 1984).
Design/methodology/approach –Inferential statistical analyses (Kruskal–Wallis and Mann–Whitney
tests) were applied to test the CRANET survey data collected from 92large-sized private-sector organizations
within an EU country characterized by a medium to high-trade union density.
Findings –Results offered consistent empirical evidence that a comprehensive set of OCM practices
are applied differently across four distinctive modalities of the union-HRM relationship. Specifically, the
“union-HRM synergy”relationship (high-HRM/high-unionization) has been recognized as the most promising
for adopting such developmental practices, providing an evidence of complementarities between trade unions
and HRM professionalism.
Practical implications –The research suggests that synergistic collaboration between trade unions and
HRM might provide employees with even more career development opportunities than when organizations
pursue the asynchronous single-sided “Total HRM strategy.”
Originality/value –This study rejuvenate a traditional career management research agenda by introducing
a new theoretical lens for studying the interplay between trade unions and HRM and have put an emphasis on
how their strength is related to the incidence of OCM practices.
Keywords HRM, Tradeunions, Organizational career management, Theory of cooperation and competition,
Union-HRM relatio nship
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Organizations achieve competitive goals by successfully managing people for the long run.
To retain and furtherimprove company’s market position through people, managersstrive to
develop employees through organizational career management (OCM) practices, i.e. a
system-wide deliberate human resource development efforts provided to support employees’
career success. Such attempts –while not undermining personal responsibility for thecareer
but accepting career self-management as an emerging type of vocational behavior (e.g. King,
2004) –emphasizethat careers do not occur in a vacuum (Sullivanand Baruch, 2009), and thus
should be examined from an organizational viewpoint (Budhwar and Baruch, 2003).
Organizations should link the individual’s career needs with the organization’s workforce
Employee Relations
Vol. 41 No. 1, 2019
pp. 84-100
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-02-2018-0035
Received 5 February 2018
Revised 27 May 2018
Accepted 2 July 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
84
ER
41,1
requirements (Schein, 1978; Tzabbar et al., 2003). Such an approach is not only positively
associatedwith individual career effectiveness (e.g. Orpen,1994) but also has a positive impact
on organizational outcomes (e.g. De Vos and Cambre, 2017).
Career management has been established as one of the core human resource
management (HRM) elements (Lazarova et al., 2012) and it might be a relevant topic for
trade union representatives as well (e.g. Healy, 1999). Existing research, however, mainly
focused on the union–non-union differences in the presence of career management in
general (e.g. Bradley et al., 2004; Healy, 1999), or more specifically in terms of HR activities
such as training incidence and duration (e.g. Green et al., 1999). Studies so far have not
clearly explained the role of trade unions in either promoting or hindering the adoption of
career management practices (see Gill, 2009). For instance, such practices might differ with
regard to the relationship between trade unions and HRM, as the two do not exclude one
another (e.g. Gill and Meyer, 2013). Despite of their importance, we still witness a scarcity of
research on career development practices regarding the union-HRM relationship (e.g.
Cristiani and Peiró, 2015; Vernon and Brewster, 2013). As trade unionism and HRM
professionalism might co-exist (Guest, 1995; Guest and Conway, 1999) or substitute each
other (Machin and Wood, 2005), the nature of their interaction can potentially influence the
extent to which OCM will be adopted within an organization.
Accordingly, with an aim to gain understanding of the contextual background created
by the complex relationship between trade union “strength”and HRM “strength,”we
followed the theory of cooperation and competition (Deutsch, 1949) to make initial
assumptions and further analyzed survey data on career management practices collected
from 92 large-sized private-sector organizations. In total, 14 OCM practices were examined
as outcomes both individually and as bundles of practices in four different modalities of the
union-HRM relationship.
Our results offer consistent empirical evidence on the positive effects of cooperative
behavior, beyond what could be achieved by pursuing conflict and competition between
unionism and managerial opposition. Thus, we attempted to move beyond a traditional
industrial relations research by introducing a new theoretical lens for studying the interplay
between trade unions and HRM; and have put an emphasis on how their relationship is
related to the occurrence of OCM practices.
The relationship between HRM and trade unions
Trade unionism represents a collective voice of employees primarily established to provide
a counter-balance to managerial opportunism. Although trade unions have been losing
power in the last decades (e.g. Ebbinghaus, 2002; Hyman, 2018; Rau, 2012), they still play a
relevant role in industrial relations, especially in some of the most developed European
countries such as Finland, Denmark or Sweden (Hyman, 2018).
The interests of organizations and unions are often seen to be in competition (Deery et al.,
2014). More specifically, HR practices are mainly perceived to be anti-union and detrimental
to union growth (Dhal, 2015), with high performance work practices (HPWPs) especially
being treated as substitutes for trade union activities (Gill, 2009; Pohler and Luchak, 2014).
Indeed, coinciding with the decline in trade unionism in the last couple of decades has
been an increase in the use of human relations practices and new forms of work organization
(Liu et al., 2009; Machin and Woods, 2005). While a confrontational approach between
management and trade union representatives was dominant throughout the last century,
since the late 1990s we witness the growing enthusiasm about the idea of partnership (Guest
and Peccei, 2008) and cooperative industrial relations (Antonioli et al., 2011).
Already Freeman and Medoff (1984) argued that the quality of the relationship between
trade unions and management determines whether trade unions will have a positive or
negative impact on business activities while Kochan et al. (1986) concluded that two parties
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Organizational
career
management
practices
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