Employment Relations Ideologies and Cooperative Partnership Approaches to Bargaining: the New Zealand Perspective

Workplace partnerships are likely to be influenced by a variety of factors. For example, since 2000 legislation in New Zealand has encouraged unions and management to work together. Research also suggests managerial values and beliefs about employment relations is a factor with the potential to influence workplace partnership behavior, and so too is past experience. These factors are not mutually exclusive. This exploratory study examines some of these relationships. In doing so it makes an assessment of the ideological orientations of a group of employers in New Zealand and explores how these relate to their attitudes and actual behaviours associated with cooperative partnerships with unions. We find a difference to exist between attitudes held by managers and their actual bargaining behaviours. Illustrative of this pragmatism is that employers keep the union at a distance when that is perceived to be in the best interests of protecting the organisation and managerial prerogatives, but co-operate with the union when ‘enlightened self interest’ suggests that is the way to best serve management’s needs. We suggest one possible explanation for this difference is that pragmatism is more dominant in guiding behavior than is ideology.