Works Councils and Organizational Performance

Abstract

Most studies on the effects of works councils simply analyze whether their mere presence contributes to firm performance. This study seeks to offer a contribution to the literature by adding, to date, largely unexplored potential contingencies: the attitudes of Dutch top managers and works councils as to the functioning of the latter, in bad vis-à-vis good times. The overall conclusion from our probit analyses is that the way in which management and works councils interact, and hence the way in which codetermination is implemented, makes all the difference to the firm's economic position. Our most compelling finding relates to the role of management: a positive attitude of managers toward the works council is positively associated with organizational performance, both in the private and the public sector. In the private sector, this result is even reinforced in times of reorganization.

Competent or Competitive? How Employee Representatives Gain Influence in Organizational Decision‐Making

“…This type of participation aims for a fairer division of power within the organization (Summers & Hyman, ) on a structural level. It also impacts a broader range of decisions (Knudsen, ), including health and safety, inclusion policies, and downsizing and restructuring (Van den Berg, Grift, & Van Witteloostuijn, ; Van der Brempt, ). These articles focus on such indirect participation.…”

Strike incidence and outcomes: New evidence from the 2019 ECS

“…As intimated above, given the size of the MM-ER sample, we make no attempt to model strikes using a multilevel mixed effects approach that controls for country (random) intercepts. Instead, country heterogeneity is handled by introducing country clusters in a manner suggested by van den Berg et al (2013), who designate five country subsets: the Germanic cluster (Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands); the Scandinavian cluster (Denmark, Finland, and Sweden); the French cluster (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece); the Anglo-Saxon cluster (Ireland and the United Kingdom); and the Transition cluster (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). 3 These country subsets are designed to capture national idiosyncrasies, including possible commonalities in collective bargaining regime, labor regulation, and unemployment insurance systems.…”

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

“…Other studies on works councils dealt with a variety of topics, including employee representatives' roles in negotiating pension claims [88,89] or engaging in social dialogues within the organization [90], their contributions to entrepreneurial success [91,92], the historical development of the works council culture in Europe and in individual European countries [93], the relevance of works councils to entrepreneurial innovation [94], and the (stress-related) burdens faced by works councils [95,96], which are rather frequently caused by role conflicts [86,97].…”

“…In these countries, a works council is part of the structural organization whose task is to consider employees' wishes and needs in entrepreneurial decisions. To be able to fulfill this task, works councils must have timely access to all relevant information; by law, they have the right to be involved in financial and personnel decisions [92,101]. Nerdinger and Wilke [102,103] even claim that this involvement is of utmost importance, since employees' interests (e.g., job security and high-quality working conditions) and organizational interests (e.g., innovation) are mutually dependent [104].…”