Revitalizing social dialogue in the workplace: the impact of a cooperative industrial relations climate and sustainable HR practices on reducing employee harm

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to unravel the relationship between current forms and realities of social dialogue in the workplace, the industrial relations climate, HRM, and employee harm. We tested a model specifying associations between (1) indicators of revitalized social dialogue, (2) perceived cooperation within the industrial relations climate, (3) perceived sustainability in HR practices, and (4) management perceptions regarding employee harm. The test was based on a survey conducted among 356 (HR-)managers and CEOs in Belgium. The results support the idea that a cooperative industrial relations climate and sustainable HR practices can reduce employee harm. More specifically, efficiency in social dialogue fully mediated the relationship between cooperative industrial climate and employee harm. In turn, industrial relations climate partially mediated the relationship between sustainable HR practices and employee harm. Finally, sustainable HR practices correlated positively with a cooperative industrial relations climate, suggesting that HR and employee relations reinforce rather than weaken each other.

Keywords:

• Social dialogue
• industrial relations climate
• sustainable HRM
• employee harm
• post-Fordist labor relations

Notes

1. Marianne Thyssen, Social Agenda No. 39. December 2014, also cited in Welz and Foden (2015).

2. Workplace representation in Belgium runs through two separate channels. The works council (CE in French and OR in Flemish) represents the entire workforce, although it is elected only in larger workplaces (more than 100 employees). The trade union delegation (DS in French and SD in Flemish) represents trade unionists. There are also separate bodies for health and safety (CPPT in French and CPBW in Flemish), which are elected by the workforce as a whole in all companies with more than 50 employees. For companies having 50–100 employees, these health and safety committees also have information and consultation rights on economic and social issues. http://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Relations/Countries/Belgium/Workplace-Representation.

3. We also ran a model with 2 controls: organization size and human capital composition (does the organization consist of mainly high-skilled employees, low-skilled employees, or a mix of both). Including these controls caused fit to decrease substantially, whilst not accounting for a lot of variance in the variables and not changing the relation of the independent variables with the outcomes. As such we did not include controls in the model.