This article examines the moderating effect of collective trust in management on the relation between job insecurity (both objective and subjective) and employee outcomes (work-related anxiety and organisational commitment). This is contextualised in the modern British workplace which has seen increased employment insecurity and widespread cynicism. We use matched employer-employee data extracted from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, which includes over 16,000 employees from more than 1100 organisations. The multilevel analyses confirm that objective job insecurity (loss of important elements of a job such as cuts in pay, overtime, training, and working hours) are significantly correlated with high levels of work-related anxiety and lower levels of organisational commitment. These correlations are partially mediated by subjective job insecurity (perception of possible job loss). More importantly, collective trust in management (a consensus of management being reliable, honest and fair) significantly attenuates the negative impact of objective job insecurity on organisational commitment, and reduces the impact of subjective job insecurity on work-related anxiety. Theoretical and practical implications and limitations of these effects are discussed.

This article examines the impact on staff of state-imposed public sector reforms alongside austerity cuts since 2010 in the emergency services of England. We discuss the contextual imperatives for change in the police, fire and ambulance services while exploring their unique labour management and industrial relations’ structures and systems. As elsewhere, the burden of cuts and reforms has fallen on the workforce managed through skill mix changes. Such site-level management responses to austerity are being implemented despite staff concerns, increased dangers to the public, and their non-sustainable nature.

Purpose Since the 2008 financial crisis, the UK workforce in general has experienced a period of stagnant and falling wages in both nominal and real terms. The main parties involved remain unsure of the consequences from such a historically unusual phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to explore the main effect on job satisfaction and organizational commitment of those employees who had experienced pay reductions (nominal wage cuts or pay freezes under a positive inflation rate) as compared with those who experienced nominal pay rises during the recent recession; and second, to examine the moderating effect of employee involvement (EI) practices on that relationship. This was done by using aggregated employee perception data to measure organizational EI practices. Design/methodology/approach Employee-employer matched data were used, involving 8,489 employees and their associated 497 organizations (medium or large sized). The number of employees from each organization was between 15 and 25. The data used were extracted from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study in the UK to which the authors applied hierarchical linear regression in STATA 13. Findings The results indicate that when compared with those employees who had nominal pay rises during the recession, employees who had wage cuts or freezes (with 5 percent inflation rate) are significantly and negatively associated with their job satisfaction and organizational commitment, even when controlling for important variables such as perception of job insecurity and the degree of adverse impact caused by recession on the organization studied. That is to say, facing the same perception of job loss, those who experienced pay reductions are significantly unhappier and less committed than those who had pay rises. However, the adverse effect of pay reductions on employees’ work attitudes is much less in workplaces characterized by a high, as opposed to a low level, of EI practices. Research limitations/implications Implications, limitations, and further research issues are discussed in light of current employment relations’ practices. Originality/value The intention is to extend the current debate on employment relations under adverse changes such as pay reductions. Thus, the unique contribution of this study is to examine the value of EI in modifying extreme employee reactions to adverse changes.

This study examines the relationship between employee referrals and employees’ job tenure through the lens of social capital theory. It does so by considering the tie strength (closeness of guanxi) between referrers and referred employees in the Chinese context. In particular, we examine the mediating effect of career benefits. We theorize that close guanxi has a significant and positive impact on the job tenure of referred employees, and that career benefits (such as having a managerial role) mediate the close guanxi effect on job tenure. This highlights the critical need to recognize the tie strength as between referrers and referred employees. The support for our hypotheses comes from the use of personnel records of 4,030 employees over 13 years in one large privately-owned manufacturer in China. Our study has theoretical and practical implications for the relational approach to tackle voluntary turnover in the workplace.

The present study examines the mediating effects of felt accountability on the relationship of both transformational leadership as well as core self-evaluation on task and contextual performance. SEM with AMOS was used to analyze the data collected from questionnaires distributed to 302 supervisor-employee dyads. The concept of felt accountability is based on a social contingency model of accountability, which is distinct from the feelings of responsibility or obligation in organizational research. Our hypotheses of the mediating roles of felt accountability were supported by the data, except that the mediating effect of felt accountability between the relationship of core self-evaluation and contextual performance was not supported. We discuss the implications of these results for research and practice in organizations.

Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to provide a brief and partial overview of some of the issues and authors that have dominated British industrial relations research since 1965. It is cast in terms of that year being the astronomical Big Bang from which all else was created. It traces a spectacular growth in academic interest and departments throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and then comments on the petering out of the tradition and its very existence (Darlington 2009; Smith 2011). Design/methodology/approach: There are no methods other than a biased look through the literature. Findings: These show a liberal oppression of the Marxist interpretation of class struggle through trade unions, collective bargaining, strikes, and public policy. At first through the Cold War and later, less well because many Marxists survived and thrived in industrial relations departments until after 2000, through closing courses and choking off demand. This essay exposes the hypocrisy surrounding notions of academic freedom, and throws light on the determination of those in the labour movement and their academic allies to push forward wage controls and stunted bargaining regimes, alongside restrictions on strikes, in the name of moderation and the middle ground. Originality/value: an attempt to correct the history as written by the pro tem victors

Public sector workers are workers even though they are not employed by profit-making firms. As a consequence their unions are part of the working-class movement. Working for state-owned and managed services does not detract either from their class position or from the need for their unions to defend and improve their terms and conditions. In the current UK situation with politically-engineered ‘austerity’ (budget, wage, and pension cuts) and the application of tougher performance management systems in the public services (New Public Management), their struggles can be seen to be one centre of the wider class struggle.

The institutional influence, specifically trade unions, on the job insecurity of workers in Foreign-owned Enterprises (FoEs) has been generally overlooked. This study uses national representative private sector data to examine firm’s layoff incident and the number of staff made redundant in response to the recent 2008-2012 recession in the UK. Our probit regression and the Negative-Binomial regression show that overall FoEs appear to be more likely to undertake redundancy and to lay off more workers than Domestically-owned Enterprises. However, the strength of trade unionism, measured by union membership density, has a moderating effect in the incident of redundancies controlling for the adverse impact of the recession on companies studied and a wide range of industrial and firm characteristics. Furthermore, FoEs’ headquarter location seems to have no effect on the propensity of layoff or quantity of layoff in the UK.

Workplace racism remains a serious issue despite over forty years of legislation alongside a raft of HRM policies. There remains limited research on the differences in employment experiences of British Black and Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) staff and their white colleagues. There is a power imbalance at work as between individual employees and management, and this lack of equity has been traditionally counterbalanced by strong workplace trade unionism. In particular, we know little about the role of trade unionism on the perception of workplace equality among BAME employees. Using more than 2,580 valid responses from full‐time employees in highly unionised local councils, this study shows that BAME employees have a significantly lower evaluation than their white colleague of fair pay and equal work environment. The latter fully mediates the negative perception between BAME staff and fair pay; and furthermore, the perception of union commitment to equality strengthened their views of a management‐supported equal work environment.