Does Modern Organization and Governance Threat Solidarity?
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Ó 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
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Does Modern Organization and Governance Threat Solidarity? KARIN SANDERS1,* and HETTY VAN EMMERIK2 1 Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, University Twente, The Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected]; 2 Sociology at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Abstract. This article focuses on solidarity behaviours of employees to team members (horizontal solidarity behaviour) and to their manager (vertical solidarity behaviour). The question is asked to what extend and how are both types of solidarity related to three aspects of modern organization and governance: dual earner families, flexible labour contracts, and formal and informal governance structures. Survey data of 17 Dutch organizations (N ¼ 1347) show in relation to dual-earner families that having children has a positive relationship with horizontal solidarity behaviour, and working overtime has a positive relationship with vertical solidarity behaviour. Related to the flexible labour contracts, no relationship was found with type of labour contract and expected years within the organization. Finally, some traits of informal and formal governance structures, namely information on rules and the presence of explicit fair play rules are fond to be positively related to solidarity. Key words: employment relationships, formal and informal governance structures, solidarity behaviour
1. Introduction Recent developments inside and outside organizations have sparked new research questions about the behaviour of managers and employees within modern work organizations. One of the characteristics of modern organizations is that employees bear a much larger responsibility for attaining production goals than in the classical hierarchical firm, and that employees are often working in teams or groups, such as management teams, project groups or self-managing teams (Goodman, 1986; Cohen and Bailey, 1997). Such teams may be responsible for a department within a hospital, the saving of a ship and his cargo, or a special unit of the police. In these self-managed teams, employees enjoy a considerable amount of autonomy and have more challenging tasks as compared to the classical workplace. Managers expect teamwork, voluntary participation, willingness to cooperate and mutual informal control of their employees in order to keep * She worked on this article during a visit at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
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the organization running (Appelbaum and Batt, 1994; Handy, 1995). The managers’ dependence on employees’ voluntary participation, willingness to cooperate and mutual informal control in these new organizational structures is interpreted here as the managers’ demand for solidarity behaviour of the employees. Solidarity is seen as one of the most important success factors within modern organizations (Wickens, 1995). Indeed, research has shown that solidarity behaviour is negatively related to employees’ resistance against organizational changes (Tore
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