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The Unitary and Pluralist Perspectives of Employee Relations

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The unitary and pluralist perspectives of employee relations Since the 1980s, there has been a significant paradigm shift in managing employee relations (ER) to one focused on more strategic and integrated frameworks that are based on employee commitment and shared workplace interests, instead of the traditional managerial control and conflicts between employers and employees (Cully et al. 1999: 57; Kaufman 2008: 317). These ER initiatives can be traced back to the 1950s in the United States, where three human resource (HR) models became prominent, namely Fombrun, Tichy, and Devanna’s (1984) ‘matching model,’ Beer et al.’s (1984) ‘Harvard model,’ and Walton’s (1985) ‘control to commitment’ model (Farnham 1993: 34). Similar ER changes occurred in the United Kingdom (UK), although mainly in larger organisations. Authors argued that the manager’s frame of reference impacts how these perspectives are interpreted and used or not used (Farnham 1993: 36, Ackers and Payne 1998: 533,and Gennard and Judge 2002: 52). The three common kinds of ER perspectives are: unitarist, pluralist, and neo-unitary (Farnham 1993: 37). This essay critically evaluates only two approaches to ER namely, the unitary and pluralist perspectives and demonstrates the implications for managing successful ER in organisations adopting the unitarist perspectives.
Unitarist perspectives
Fox (1996) stated that there are two major frames of reference for ER, the unitarist and pluralist frameworks (cited in Farnham 1993: 36). There are several main elements of the unitarist perspective. First, there is only a single source of authority in organisation, which is usually the management, and oppositionary leaders are non-existent (Ross and Bamber 2009: 25). Second, the role of organisational leaders is to promote loyalty and commitment among workers (Farnham 1993: 36, and Ackers and Payne

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