Advanced Business Policy, OD and ADR
an organization functions and responds to change. Overall, the aim is to adopt a planned and coherent approach to improving organizational effectiveness. An effective organization can be defined broadly as one that achieves its purpose by meeting the wants and needs of its stakeholders, matching its resources to opportunities, adapting flexibly to environmental changers and creating a culture that promotes commitment, creativity, shared values and mutual trust.
Organization Development (OD) is therefore a planned systematic process in which applied behavioral science principles and practices are introduced into an ongoing organization towards the goals of effecting organizational improvement, greater organizational competence, and greater organizational effectiveness. The focus is on organizations and their improvement or, to put it in another way, total systems change. The orientation is on action - achieving desired results as a result of planned activities. Tools that facilitate the Organization Development are advanced business policies such as policies relating to Industrial Relation/Employee relation. These are policies that assist the organization in prevention and solving of Industrial disputes and hence create favorable working condition for the Organization Development and Prosperity.
CHAPTER THREE: INDUSTRIAL RELATION/ EMPLOYEE RELATION
According to Michael Armstrong (M.Armstrong 2000) four approaches to employee relation’s policies have been identified by Industrial Relations Services (1994):
Adversarial: the organization decides what it wants to do, and employees are expected to fit in. Employees only exercise power by refusing to cooperate.
Traditional: a good day-to-day working relationship but management proposes and the workforce reacts through its elected representatives.
Partnership: the organization involves employees in the drawing up and execution of organization policies, but retains the right to manage.
Power sharing: employees are involved in both day-to-day and strategic decision making.
Adversarial approaches are much less common than in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The traditional approach is still the most typical but more interest is being express in partnership, power sharing is rare.
3.1 Nature and purpose of employee relation’s policies
Against the background of a preference for one of the four approaches listed above, employee relations policies express the philosophy of the organization on what sort of relationships between management and employees and their unions are wanted, and how they should be handled. A partnership policy will aim to develop and maintain a positive, productive, cooperative and trusting climate of employee relations.
When they are articulated, policies provide guidelines for action on employee relation’s issues and can help to ensure that these issues are dealt with consistently. They provide the basis for defining management’s intentions (its employee relations strategy) on key matters such as union recognition and collective bargaining.
The areas covered by employees’ relations’ policies are:
-Trade union recognition- whether trade unions should be recognized or de-recognized, which union or unions the organization would prefer to deal with,
And whether or not it is desirable to recognize only one union for collective bargaining and /or employee representational purposes;
1. Collective bargaining
The extent to which it should be [next page]