Work Arrangements and Voice Effects: Employee Voice and its Impact on the Individual and the Organization – WAVE

The functioning and impact of different institutional structures and processes of collective voice on firm performance has gained both political and academic interest in recent years. This increase in interest was triggered by the economic crisis of 2008–9, when the ability of some types and structures of collective bargaining to provide flexibility for companies to maintain competitiveness began to be questioned in some countries. Moreover, in a time of high and rising inequality, voice systems that reduce inequality have a greater value than they would in a time of low or falling inequality. Unions, for example, invariably trade off some economic efficiency for the sake of greater justice in the workplace. The proposed research project is a ground-breaking innovative analysis of the mechanism through which employee voice affect firm competitiveness. Going beyond state-of-the-art studies on the economic effects of unions, our analysis of labour relations expands the analysis of employee voice beyond the unions/collective bargaining versus non-union management decision-making dichotomy to examine the changing work arrangements and channels through which workers seek to affect workplace outcomes.