Procedural and Substantive Guarantees

The argument in the previous section suggests that partnership is most likely to lead to improvements in organisational performance when it functions as an institutional guarantor for trust, commitment and legitimacy. Two types of partnership guarantee are identified in the literature: "substantive" and "procedural".

"Substantive guarantees" are mutual commitments to certain actions or outcomes, or to the avoidance of certain actions or outcomes, so that goals are shared. "Procedural guarantees" are those that define the rights of both sides in decision-making, so that all have confidence in the process.

Procedural and substantive guarantees work by undermining mutual suspicion between managers and employees and introducing more transparency into each side's interests and the power relationships between them. But they require strong commitment from political leadership, as without it, managers are much less likely to take the risks associated with entering into workplace partnership arrangements. Indeed, the more solid the guarantees defining the relationship between management and employees, the less managers will be able to enter into them without a corresponding guarantee underpinning their relationship with the political leadership to which they are primarily accountable.

The Spectrum of Partnership Relationships

While the literature sheds important light on the ideal characteristics of workplace partnership, in practice, the aims with which participants enter partnership arrangements, and the underlying attitudes they bring to them, cover a wide spectrum.

At one end are those who see partnership as a technique; one among a range of approaches to winning worker commitment. There is a good deal of evidence that this is the preferred model among managers, particularly in the UK. At the other end are those who see partnership as an extension of democracy. This can involve the delegation of managerial power into radical forms of self-management. Somewhere in between can be found the majority of existing partnership relationships, in which the aim is to promote "mutual gains". While the emphasis is on cooperation, the inevitability of conflicts of interest is also acknowledged.

The most notable feature of this mode of partnership is that the most basic existing prerogatives of employers and unions remain unchallenged. Distributive or adversarial bargaining continues for traditional industrial relations issues, such as pay, and terms and conditions, and unilateral management decisions remain the norm for high-level strategic issues.

However, the evidence suggests that, even when partnership is described in "mutual gains" terms, managers often understand it as simply another technique for pursuing organisational aims through exercising control rather than the sharing of decision-making power. Investigations into partnership practices in the UK health service found that concepts such as team-building, communication and empowerment were typically seen by staff as empty words, and not accompanied by management practices that gave them a clear voice at senior management level.

The report argues that these perceptions, which reveal limits to trust in partnership relationships, may help to explain why high-trust, involvement-driven work systems are yet to emerge on anything like the scale that might be expected, given the record of success where they have been tried. More whole-hearted approaches to partnership, and the benefits they can bring, are likely to remain exceptional as long as managers are unable or unwilling to share their existing prerogatives to the extent required.

Mutual Gains: An Uncomfortable Compromise?

The "mutual gains" model is currently the form of partnership winning most favour with public sector employers in most of the English-speaking world. Unions and government in Ireland, the UK, the USA, South Africa and New Zealand are all broadly in favour of union-management relationships in which the formal rights of each party remain as they have traditionally been, but where there are voluntary moves - some modest, some more ambitious - towards a blurring of these boundaries.

Why is workplace partnership not more widespread in the public sector than it is? If it is the case that the benefits of partnership arise from individual employee autonomy and discretion, and from representative participation that guarantees that employee interests, opinions, knowledge and experience are factored into decision-making, why does the adoption of partnership remain a managerial choice rather than an obligation?

The report argues, on the basis of the evidence in the literature, that lack of political commitment can undermine the institutionalisation of partnership relationships and that, without this, they are often unable to be sustained for long enough to build the virtuous spiral required. Unions cling to the older procedural guarantees of adversarial collective bargaining, reinforcing management beliefs that ceding power is too risky.

While far from ideal, by enabling partnership to proceed on the understanding that either side can retreat into the conventional labour relations machinery if necessary, this "mutual gains" compromise provides a safety net without which some partnership arrangements might break down more irrevocably.

New Public Management as an Obstacle to Partnership

A factor in managerial reluctance to more whole-heartedly embrace partnership with employees may be the pressures on them of performance management systems typical of the NPM approach. These tend to reward or punish managers for their performance against output targets rather than providing them with incentives to innovate. In such a climate of fear, it is understandable that managers are reluctant to delegate control of their fate to others.

In addition, the application of NPM often involved experimentation with what has been called a "hard market" in public sector employment. Combined with a severe cost-cutting agenda, this trend directly undermined a very important substantive guarantee by exposing employees to the threat of market-based pay and conditions, and unions to the threat of the division in their ranks.

What this discussion suggests is that both management and employees may feel unable to provide the procedural and substantive guarantees that successful partnership demands, which brings us back to the role of political leadership. Here, the problem may be that the timescales involved in organisational transformation are longer than those of the political cycle, with the result that politicians have insufficient incentives to promote workplace partnership. They risk being blamed for failure without being able to reap the benefits of success.

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