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EXAMINATION OF THE EFFECT OF INDUSTRIAL RELATION PRACTICES ON ORGANIZATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1       BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

Industrial relations is a multidisciplinary field that studies the employment relationship. Industrial relations is increasingly being called employment relations because of the importance of non-industrial employment relationships. Many outsiders also equate industrial relations to labour relations and believe that industrial relations only studies unionized employment situations, but this is an oversimplification (Ackers, Peter, 2002).   

Industrial relations has its roots in the industrial revolution which created the modern employment relationship by spawning free labour markets and large-scale industrial organizations with thousands of wage workers. As society wrestled with these massive economic and social changes, labour problems arose. Low wages, long working hours, monotonous and dangerous work, and abusive supervisory practices led to high employee turnover, violent strikes and the threat of social instability. Intellectually, industrial relations was formed at the end of the 19th century as a middle ground between classical economics and Marxism, with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial Democracy (1897) being the key intellectual work. Industrial relations thus rejected the classical economics (www.wikipedia.org).

According to Englama (2001), industrial relations refers to the combination of interactions that take place between the employee and employer in an organization. He believed that the fundamental problem in all organization, whether business, educational, local or national, was in developing and maintaining a dynamic and harmonious relationship in the workplace. To achieve this, group dynamics, policy making by consultation, diffusion of authority, delegation, vertical and horizontal communication have to be ushered in.

In more recent time industrial relations have been influenced by other social sciences such as organizational psychology and behaviour. Traditionally, economics and law were two main influences on industrial relations, which led to a concentration on macro level industrials relations, and therefore on unions, government and collective bargaining. Paradoxically, industrial relations, though dealing with “relation” has until recently largely ignored the social science sciences relevant to behaviour and human relations. While labour problems are the result of imperfections in the employment relationship, industrial relations should be seen as the theories and methods which have been developed over time to address and correct these problems, in both public and private sector of the economy.

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