 Welcome back. This is the last clip that belongs to Chapter 6, The Power of Workers. And in this clip I will discuss the unitaristic perspective on voice. In the last clip we discussed the conflict paradigm, whereas the unequal power position between workers and employers is problematic. In this clip we will take a slightly different perspective and argue that the unequal power position between employers and employees is there, but that it is in their joint interest to make sure that employees voice their concerns. So after this clip you will understand what is meant by the unitarist paradigm. We will have a closer look at different voice behaviors. We will talk about employee involvement theories, especially about empowerment, and I will shortly say something about the pluralist perspective. So what is meant with the unitarist paradigm when it comes to employee voice? So what is meant with the unitarist paradigm and the theories associated with that when it comes to employee voice? So according to the unitarist paradigm, the starting point is that organizational profit is a good thing. And it is a good thing because it can benefit both the organization but also employees. Because organizations that have more money will have a better position, they will be better able to ensure that employees also receive the things that they like. So there's more opportunities in good performing organizations to ensure employee well-being than there is in organizations that are suffering a lot in the market. Both win. That's the core idea when there's a collaboration between employers and employees. Employees can contribute to organization performance because they have a lot of knowledge about the work processes in the organization. Actually, it has been a long while since they last performed the tasks. Maybe they were hired from outside even and they don't know in detail what employees know about the work. So in order to listen to what employees know, you need to stimulate the dialogue. And this dialogue also involves employee motivation. So you really want to understand all the different aspects that contribute to a high performing organization that make employees be happy and productive. So in order to engage employees and to make sure that they can contribute to the organization, you need to make sure that employees feel that they have the opportunity to contribute to the organization. So cooperation will benefit the organization and the employees. So the logic here is that cooperation means a win-win for both the employers and the employees. So in the end they have the same interest, which makes it a unitarist perspective. In unity they try to make the organization better for both the employer and the employees. So the outcome of this paradigm is not so much the fairness of employees but more the productivity of the organization as a whole and the employees' role in there. So also their motivation to perform, their extra role behavior and all the conditions that make employees in the perfect place to be good performers. A core theme here is therefore employee involvement. And these are all the interventions that are there to stimulate employee voice. So employee involvement is very much advancing a unitarist paradigm. There's power in the involvement of employees in management. If employees share their ideas, their concerns, their knowledge about customers, there are anything with management, then together they are able to make the organization better and make sure that everybody in the end gets a good return of that. So let's have a closer look at voice behaviors. So what kind of behavior can employees show in order to break the silence that organizations and employees do not find constructive? What you're looking for here is upward voice. What organizations hope is that employees dare to speak up once they see something in the organization that is obstructing a good work practice or that's hindering good performance or that's causing dissatisfaction amongst employees. So upward voice is speaking up concerns about work. And this is discretionary behavior. Discretionary behavior is behavior that is not part of your labor contract. So it's a free choice to speak up. If you don't speak up, there's no penalties for that. So upward voice is a discretionary behavior and the conditions should be positive, providing for employees to be willing to share their concerns. So oftentimes in this type of literature we talk about proactive employee behaviors for employees who take the initiative to improve their work or to talk with colleagues or discuss with management to improve things and this is part of extra role behavior. Extra role behavior being all the behaviors that are not part of the legal contract but which are very much appreciated by organizations because they make the social context, they make the innovation, they make all the extras that is needed to make the social system of an organization as a whole function well. So voice behaviors are very much appreciated but they are not obliged. So a key question here is how to stimulate these voice behaviors. So what can organizations do to stimulate employees actually there to speak up and there to be proactive? A big theory in this area is empowerment theory. Empowerment as the picture illustrates there is make sure that employees have a leeway to take their own decisions and to do what they think is the best to execute their work in a most efficient and most productive way. So empowerment is about having formal authority or control over organizational resources and the ability to make decisions relevant to a person's job or role. The opposite of empowerment is control. In conditions of strict control management has a lot of power and they determine for minute to minute almost what employees do and powered employees on the other hand they reduce the power gap between management and employees and they make sure that employees have control themselves over what they do. So they delegate some of the control responsibility to lower levels in the organization. Empowerment to a large extent facilitates voice and proactive behavior because if you make employees responsible to have control over their job so about how they do it, with whom, with which materials then they have to think how to do that in a most efficient way and they have to speak up and to collaborate and they have to be proactive. So empowered employees they have the power to make decisions within of course the scope and domain of their work. Actually there are quite, empowerment can happen in many different levels but it can be on a jobs level so worker can decide for themselves what times they work and which tasks to do first and what not. But you can also empower an entire team. So for example in self-managed teams employees have the power to together decide which are the priority of work tasks, how they can do it, with whom to cooperate and there are even examples of empowered organizations. Even for example a corrupt employee owned cooperative where all the employees have a part of, own a part of the organization. In such organizations employees are completely empowered to run the organization and there are examples very interesting ones that show how these kind of things work. To make this empowerment work you need to distinguish between structural and psychological empowerment. So structural empowerment here means organizing that employees have the autonomy and the room to speak up so these are creating conditions for empowerment. Psychological empowerment on the other hand is how employees perceive that they are empowered. So put simply you can organize and say to employees hey from day on tomorrow you are free to voice all your complaints because we have now a new manager like well organized and nice person you can tell anything to them. However if employees have a history of being controlled a lot they may fear the sudden change of structure. They may not feel empowered. They may feel reluctant to share their concerns. So to make empowerment work it's important to do both things. It's important to organize so that people have the formal authority to take decisions about their job or their team or the organization and that they are psychologically empowered. That they feel that they are capable of sharing. So let me zoom in a little bit about the dimensions of structural and psychological empowerment in the next slide. So what are structural conditions that facilitate empowerment that make sure that people take responsibility and voice what they know. So there are many different conditions research that we know that have an impact on how people can be empowered and they can be on institutional or even national level economic, political, cultural and also all these things could facilitate or hinder that employees voice their concerns at work. Practices that hinder empowerment and for example strict hierarchical organizational structures and factors that help empowerment as for example providing employees access to a lot of information and to provide support to employees. Make sure that they have the resources to be actually able to take ownership. Just say that you have ownership and also make sure that they have the means to be responsible. So a lot of examples are listed here. So for example participative decision making, skills and knowledge based pay which means that people are paid for what they know and not for what they perform. Employee ownership I have just mentioned. Make sure that there is a good flow of information about how well the company is doing, what the company strategy is. So increase literally the knowledge in the organization is very important. And flat organizational structures are more helpful than very hierarchical ones. Psychological empowerment so the feeling that you are really allowed to take this initiative is a cognitive process. It's a cognitive about using your empowerment and cognitions about using your empowerment in the organization. So it starts with I think it's important so it has meaning to me. I want to be to do this proactive giving my opinion. Also it has to do with competence. I think I can do it. It has to do with motivation. It's something I really like to do and it has to do with the impact. Do I really think that it will make a difference if I speak up now? These four psychological cognitions about empowerment, they are the condition that really make employees be willing to proactively behave and to voice their concerns upwardly. So there's again interesting meta-analysis on this. You see their antecedents. These are the conditions that lead to psychological empowerment. So a lot of the things we just mentioned are also visible in this figure. And on the right hand side you see the outcomes of people of a workforce that feels empowered. And what is interesting here is that they are attitudinal and behavioral consequences and you could translate these as, on the one hand, the happy employee. So there is fairness and worker outcomes. And on the other hand, high performance because motivated employees will show all the behaviors that are beneficial to the organization. So this figure supports the idea of the unitarist perspective that if you invest in employee empowerment and if employees really feel empowered that will result in beneficial outcomes to employees. They will be more happy but also beneficial outcomes for organizations because there will be better performance. So to wrap up, where does this empowerment happen in organizations? Where does this unitarist perspective of involvement show? Well, the same figure as I showed in the last picture to illustrate industrial relations concentrates now our vision on processes in the organization. So in the left button side of this figure you see things like teamwork, you see things like project work. So all the things where employees get the opportunity to have a say in the work and directly talk with management about work conditions but also about how the work is done and how it can be improved. Again, you see here yellow marks the Joint Consult Committee because this is oftentimes a vehicle in an organization where management sits together with employees and talks also about strategic questions to the organization. And it's much appreciated that these people represent employees working in the organization to also listen to their voice. And there are cool examples in the literature where the Works Council or the Joint Consult Committee, which are used interchangeably, had a good say, for example, in a planned reorganization where management before starting had the idea that they would have had a lot of redundancies, which is of course not beneficial to employees, and where the Works Council came up with an alternative, which was equally valuable in terms of the benefits of profitability but which was able to save a lot of jobs. So here you see that having these voice mechanisms organized in the organization is a way to safeguard the win-win to happy employees and productive organization. So where do we stand? We discussed unitarist perspective. We discussed the conflict perspective. So who's right? Well, I'm not going to give the answer because the answer is given, I guess, in the pluralist perspective. It's the most recent addition to a perspective on industrial relations. And it says that it can exist both. It's probably the easiest answer. So in a society there are a lot of forces or stakeholders that have a stake in how human resource management is organized. And by definition they are of different power and by definition these are conflictual relationships. Is this problematic? No, because according to the pluralistic view there are many different stakeholders and they all have many different interests. That's the idea of plural, multiple. There are employers, employees, other stakeholders. They will have conflicts but these can be managed. If all these stakeholders keep in communication with each other they will come to solutions. And what you see in practice is that there are industrial relations systems that are in some kind of equilibrium that works for a while in a good way. And then something happens that disrupts the system. And then the parties may go into conflict with each other and they will start negotiating again until this ends in a new equilibrium where some things have changed and many things maybe stay the same. So this continuous presence of conflict, but manageable conflict is core to the pluralistic view and that safeguards modern-day employment relations. I think this is also confirmed in reality where if you remember the figure that we showed about the different stakeholders and what happens inside organizations there's evidence for both the conflict, managing the conflict paradigm as well as managing employee voice from a unitary perspective. So this leads to the conclusion that the management goal of effectiveness can exist next to the employee goal of fairness. It brings me to the end. By now you know that the unitary perspective promotes employee voice because it's good for the organization as well as for employees. Voice and proactive behaviors are employee behaviors to improve their work and the organization they work in that their structural empowerment that facilitates the employees' involvement to be proactive and that their psychological empowerment as the mechanism that explains if employees are really willing to be proactive in the organization. That's it.