It has been argued that with a decentralised IR system, and unions absent from the workplace
there will be a rise in employee commitment to the organisation and an increase in
productivity. Other research indicates that union membership and employee participation
programs that are administered jointly with unions are positively associated with job
satisfaction and organisational commitment, improvements in product quality, and
performance improvements.
To discover if a gap exists between the rhetoric and reality of managerial attitudes and
practice research was undertaken in three Australian companies. The findings show that a
pluralist collectivist view outweighs that of unitarist individualism.