Predicting Organizational and Union Commitment: The Effect of Industrial Relations Climate
| Author | Stephen J. Deery,Peter J. Erwin,Roderick D. Iverson |
| Date | 01 December 1994 |
| Published date | 01 December 1994 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1994.tb01052.x |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
32:4
Dec
1994
0007-1080
$3.00
Predicting Organizational and Union
Commitment: The Effect
of
Industrial
Relations Climate
Stephen
J.
Deery, Roderick
D.
lverson and
Peter
J.
Erwin
Abstract
Research evidence from North America shows that employees can be
committed simultaneously to both their union and their company. Moreover,
a
co-operative industrial relations climate has been seen to be conducive to the
existence of higher levels of commitment to both organizations. This study
utilized
a
sample of white-collar unionbts in Australia to identify whether
union and company commitment could be predicted by the same factors and
whether positive perceptions
of
the industrial relations climate were related to
dual commitment. The research found no evidence of dual commitment.
Furthermore, company and union commitment were predicted by different
factors, and employee perceptions of
a
co-operative industrial relations
climate were associated with higher employee commitment to the company
but lower commitment to the union.
1.
Introduction
During the
1980s
there was a rekindling
of
research interest in the subject
of
dual commitment, particularly among behavioural scientists in North
America (Fukami and Larson
1984;
Gallagher
1984;
Angle and Perry
1986;
Magenau
et al.
1988;
Barling
et
al.
1990)
and to a more modest extent in the
UK
(see
Guest and Dewe
1991).'
This growth
of
interest appears to have
been prompted by a number
of
factors. In the USA, Gordon and Ladd
(1990)
suggest, for example, that mounting pressures on American manu-
facturers and unions to develop co-operative approaches to the problems
of
international competition raised the issue
of
whether such bi-partisan
ventures could in fact succeed. On the other hand, Beauvais
et al.
(1991)
noted that the expansion
of
unionism among white-collar and professional
staff in North America had sparked fears among employers that union
Stephen Deery, Roderick Iverson and Peter Erwin work in the Department
of
Management
and Industrial Relations at the University
of
Melbourne.
582
membership would be incompatible with the maintenance
of
high standards
of
professionalism and organizational involvement. They argued that such
concerns could be assuaged only by evidence that employees were capable
of
being committed to both their employment organization and their union.
Two other reasons would also seem to be important. The apparently
wider use
of
human resource management policies by companies in the
1980s (see Blyton and Turnbull 1992) has raised the question of whether
these policies may have increased organizational commitment at the
expense
of
union loyalty. There have been suggestions that the introduction
of employee involvement programmes and the application
of
more exten-
sive forms of information-sharing have not been unassociated with attempts
to
marginalize unions and reduce their capacity to mobilize industrial action
(Guest 1989; Purcell 1991). In Britain, the most frequently cited reason
for
the implementation
of
employee shareholding
or
profit-sharing arrange-
ments has been the promotion
of
worker commitment to the organization
(Kelly and Kelly 1991). Under these circumstances, it would seem important
to
understand whether companies are competing with unions for the loyalty
of
employees
or
whether employees can maintain simultaneous commit-
ments to both the union and the employing organization.
The other stimulus to the development
of
this area of research has been
the construction
of
a reliable measure
of
union commitment (Gordon
et
al.
1980). Almost all empirical investigations
of
dual commitment to date
have utilized the Gordon
et al.
(1980) union commitment scale in a full
or
shortened version. The development of a rigorous criterion
of
union com-
mitment has enabled researchers to test more effectively the generality of
propositions about organizational and union commitment in a range
of
different work and institutional settings. Gordon
et al.
(1980) found that
their measure
of
union commitment comprised four distinct factors: union
loyalty (consisting
of
a sense
of
pride in the union combined with an
awareness
of
the benefits
of
union membership), responsibility to the
union (the extent to which the individual is willing to fulfil day-to-day
obligations and duties
of
membership), willingness
to
work for the union
(a member’s preparedness to provide services to the union), and a belief
in unionism (the extent
of
a member’s attachment to the general concept
of
unionism).
It has been normal to measure dual commitment by obtaining scores on
separate union and company commitment scales and establishing the
magnitude
of
the relationships between the scales. A significant, positive
correlation between the two measures has been seen as evidence
of
dual
commitment (Gordon and Ladd 1990). An alternative approach has been
adopted by Angle and Perry (1986), who developed a five-item scale to
measure commitment both to the employing organization and to the
union. In this way, dual commitment was measured directly rather than
by inference (Hartley 1992). However, it has been suggested that the
scale may be neither a reliable nor a valid measure (see Beauvais
et al.
1991).
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
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