Industrial Relations Climate: A Case Study Approach

Abstract

The industrial relations climate of a steelworks was investigated through a programme of structured interviews with shop stewards and managers at all levels. Interviewees were asked how often they handled different types of industrial relations issues, how often they interacted with their opposite numbers at different levels to solve those problems, how satisfied they were with the way each of the problems were handled and, how satisfied they were with their opposite numbers' handling of industrial relations problems generally. Results shows that there was union‐management agreement about the nature of the local climate, but that the climate differed across departments in accordance with data from independent sources. The findings also indicated that in this plant the climate was more ‘issue‐centred’ than ‘person‐centred’. It was concluded that the technique could be similarly useful in other settings for the speedy appraisal of industrial relations at plant level, but that more comparative research on industrial relations climate was needed.

Citation

Nicholson, N. (1979), "Industrial Relations Climate: A Case Study Approach", Personnel Review, Vol. 8 No. 3, pp. 20-25. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055386