Abstract
This paper examines the proposition that joint consultation can be a successful technique for securing employee co-operation and commitment to improvements in organizational efficiency, even where these improvements involve organizational and technological change programmes which include redundancies and job modifications. Empirically the study investigates the operation of a consultative system under the different conditions prevailing in 3 factories of a major British frozen food company. Theoretically these data are considered against two competing hypotheses: one, that joint consultation represents a bureaucratic endeavour to secure greater information-management and is dysfunctional to encouraging co-operative attitudes among employees; the other, that consultation is both meaningful to employees as an information-exchange venue and has important relational consequences reducing social distance, the net effect of the two aspects being to encourage co-operative employee attitudes.
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© 1982 Plenum Press, New York
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Ursell, G., Blyton, P. (1982). Consultation: A Method to Secure Employee Cooperation in Organizational and Technological Change Programmes?. In: Mensch, G., Niehaus, R.J. (eds) Work, Organizations, and Technological Change. NATO Conference Series, vol 11. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3458-3_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3458-3_20
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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