Employee Representatives and a Good Working Life: Achieving Social and Communicative Sustainability for HRM

Abstract

This article examines the role of employee representatives, who support HRM in positioning itself and the organization as “socially responsible”. Based on a constructivist understanding of organizational communication, employee representatives are examined as previously unrecognized entities that are responsible—and also essential—for guaranteeing a good working life, which also originates through communication. The article provides an overview of existing studies on employee representatives and their positions in companies and tries to bridge the gaps among organizational communication, CSR communication, and management theory by redesigning the role of employee representatives—who have received limited academic attention to date—as communicators. The insights from an international comparative study confirm that employee representatives perceive themselves not only as a “grief box” or “control body” of management, but also as a responsible agent and “medium” for the realization of social and communicative sustainability. This not only opens up new research perspectives, but also highlights the need to conceptually deal and theoretically discuss employee representatives and their roles in internal communication processes from the perspectives of organizational communication, HRM, CSR, and sustainability.

Healthy Leadership and Workplace Health Promotion as a Pre-Requisite for Organizational Health

“…As already mentioned above, the "war for talent" conditioned a paradigm shift, emphasizing the need to attract qualified employees, develop them, and keep them in the company [32]. As good human resources are difficult to replace, they represent one of the rarest and most valuable resources of an organization [35] and are part of the organization's movement towards sustainability [33,36].…”

“…Changes in Human Resources' orientation are, first and foremost, conditioned by a paradigm shift, which stresses the necessity to invest in competitiveness (and skilled employees) instead of boosting productivity [32][33][34]. Since human resources are hard to copy, they constitute an organizations' rarest and most valuable resource [35] and are part of the organization's movement towards sustainability [36].…”

Socially Responsible Human Resource Management: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda

“…Such factors include firms' strategic policies and priorities [48,60], available financial resources [60], HRM systems design [60], HRM power in the organization [26], ethics-oriented HRM philosophies [65], the multi-nationality of firms [93], as well as organizational structure and culture [80]. The third antecedent category is related to the individual factors, including employees' needs and wants [21,62,77,79], the presence of an ethical leader [60,61,75,89,92,101], the HR professionals' perception of their ethical role [61], and the role of employees' representatives in organizations [56].…”

“…[51]; Shao, Zhou, and Gao[52]; García Mestanza et al[53]; Revuelto-Taboada et al[54]; Sobhani et al[55]; Koinig and Weder[56]; He and Kim[57]; Adu-Gyamfi et al[58];Chang et al[59] Shen and Jiuhua Zhu[21]; D'Cruz and Noronha[60]; Parkes and Davis[61]; Newman et al[62]; Mory et al[63]; Barrena-Martínez et al[64]; Richards and Sang[65] Tongo[66]; Shen and Zhang[67]; Heikkinen et al[26]; Zhang et al[68]; Zhao et al[69] Barrena-Martinez et al[70]; Lombardi et al[71]; Sorribes et al[72]; Gangi et al[73] …”

“…Goergen et al [93]; Diaz-Carrion et al[78]; Gangi et al[73]; Koinig and Weder[56]; Lythreatis et al[89] 4 USA 3 5.26% Shan et al[100]; Brown[101]; Lee[84] …”