Employee involvement and participation in the organisational change decision: Illawarra and Australian patterns

There has been an increased use of employee involvement and participation mechanisms in corporate decision making in the 1990s. These are often initiated by management as a means of harnessing employee expertise in decisions to introduce new technologies and to gain employee cooperation in substantial corporate restructuring and changes to work practices which have been introduced to improve the competitiveness of these organisations in global markets. It has been suggested that managers have a preference for direct negotiations with employees rather than representational consultative mechanisms, which often involving union representatives, when negotiating organisational change. Australia has had a relatively low use of formal consultative mechanism. This may be a means of avoiding involving unions in these decisions, which are considered an area of managerial prerogative. This paper analyses the patterns of employee involvement in organisational change decisions using data from the 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey and a parallel survey conducted in the Illawarra Region of NSW in 1996. The initial results suggested that, while both areas had a higher incidence of direct over representational procedures, this wa