The impact of economic performance of a transformation in workplace relations

This study examines how a transformation in patterns of conflict and cooperation affected economic performance in 25 work areas of a large, unionized manufacturing facility in the period 1984-87. Unlike most studies of industrial relations and economic performance, this study clearly distinguishes conflict from cooperation but evaluates the two together, rather than focusing on only one. An analysis of data collected from union and employer ecords and interviews strongly suggests that work areas with "traditional " labor-management relations, rooted in adversarial assumptions, had higher costs, more scrap, lower productiv-ity, and a lower return to direct labor hours worked than work areas with "transformational " relations, characterized by increased coopera-tion and improved ispute resolution. M OST recent studies that seek to link industrial relations activities to eco-nomic performance or productivity focus either on new developments in labor-management cooperation or on patterns of industrial conflict. In this study I develop and test the thesis that links between industrial relations and economi