Different Aspects of Employee Relations - Essay Example

This raises the issue that at any one time there may be a number of ideologies within an organisation, which underpin the social relations of work (Mannheim 1936, p. 59; 61). While managers and employers may have diverse interests between them, management as a collection of employees is 'structurally dependent' on employers rather than inclined to any collaboration with the workers. Within organisations, managers' ideology, imbued with notions of professional autonomy or managerial prerogative, 'will always be deployed against developments which may lead towards more egalitarian relations in production'(Clegg, Boreham & Dow 1986, p. 169). .

Unitarism can be defined as the aim of a team being defined by one common purpose. This perspective focuses on some core issues such as conformity and sharing of goals. They further desire an absence of conflict in a well functioning organization. According to the Kochan's report published in 1982, on the application of a unitary framework for analyzing conflicts in a US organization. The unitarists theorists did not deny that conflicts exist but they attributed this existence of conflict in the organizations workplace to being more interpersonal than structural factors being into play.

There ar In, simpler words, unitarists believe in an organization that has a common set of goals. They also believe in forming a conflict free organization. There are certain philosophical foundations to unitarism "then the implication seems to be that unitarism emerges from a contract view of work relationships that would naturally see the ethical justification for HR Decisions. In a deontological view "(Shaw 1999:63)Unitarist theories may in fact make a problem clearer. By having common goals and all working towards the same goals can provide a method of making "two and two equal five rather than three and a half" (Harvey-Jones, 1995: 9).

Harvey-Jones has also refereed to the fact that management is an art, not a science. "It is an art because management consists of enlisting the freely given support of disparate groups of people at different time to achieve, by their own free will, an agreed common purpose." (Harvey-Jones, 1995: 6). It is vital that in the end that all the individuals within the organiozation are working towards the same goal i.e success of the organization . A unitarist perspective dominates organizations like IBM , Kodak , Hewlett Packard and 3M .

Because this perspective holds that all the individuals within an organization are working towards a common goal it automatically rules out conflict in any form. Further more; often the view presented above is criticized. But in argument to their convictions they say that conflict does not need to exist. But if it has occurred it is because the management of the organizati