Read news releases and research updates from the September 2017 newsletter.
Research report: public sector workplace bullying
Hamish Crimp, School of Management, Victoria Business School.
High levels of workplace bullying in the New Zealand public sector have the potential to severely impact the individuals and organisations who are tasked with delivering core government services to millions of New Zealanders. Is enough being done to effectively prevent and manage this destructive workplace phenomenon?
The findings of a Victoria University Masters research project indicate that whilst departments generally have adequate policies in place, there are further steps that should be taken to provide our public sector workers with a safe work environment free from bullying and harassment.
Prof. Quinetta Roberson: 'Developing organisational capacity through diversity and inclusion'
Diversity and inclusion in the workplace is considered an important goal but frequently for its own sake. Professor Quinetta Roberson, from the School of Business, Villanova University, Pennsylvania recently presented a seminar, hosted by CLEW, that looked at the importance of diversity and inclusion to organisation performance. Professor Roberson has the unusual combination of finance and human resources and was thus able to explore this issue from the financial and management perspectives.
Professor Roberson opened with the phrase “diversity does not drive firm performance” and encouraged the audience to think about how diversity was connected to performance. Analyses from the McKinsey Global Institute and Morgan Stanley showed how gender and ethnically diverse organisations outperformed, and brought more return, than not so diverse organisations. She also presented the results of one of her own studies showing that organizational performance initially declines as the representation of racial minorities in leadership increases, but once that increase passes a certain point, that diversity starts to be related to increases in performance (Quinetta & Park, 2007).
Collective bargaining across three decades
Stephen Blumenfeld and Noelle Donnelly, CLEW.
For those of you with an interest in employment matters, you will recall the 1990s as a decade characterised by the negotiation of non-union collective contracts and the loss of automatic and exclusive rights for unions within workplaces, which swiftly led to decentralisation of collective bargaining, the demise of multi-employer bargaining, and the retrenchment of employment conditions across New Zealand. Effectively overnight, the country’s long-standing highly-centralised industrial relations system was replaced with a system based on individual employment contracting. As a result, collective bargaining became exclusively an enterprise-level phenomenon, and pattern bargaining was largely abandoned. The introduction of the Employment Contracts Act (ECA) in 1991 was, in this sense, a watershed event that would forever change relationships between employers and employees and transform the country’s industrial relations landscape. As many have noted, the enactment of the ECA represented a radical ideological shift which, by the mid-1990s, had irrevocably altered the nature of industrial relations in New Zealand.
Bargaining trends presented in seminars around the country
CLEW recently completed the roadshow of seminars on our 2017 edition of Employment Agreements: Bargaining Trends and Employment Law Update. Close to 300 HR professionals, employment lawyers, union officials and policy analysts attended the seminars held in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, with many people attending for the first time.
The seminars present analysis of the 2016/2017 data from the Employment Agreements Database and the analysis showed some interesting emerging trends.
