Suchergebnisse

This article explores issues of workplace justice and organization legitimacy founded in formal employee grievance programs and procedures designed to afford aggrieved employees procedural due process, equal treatment and fairness. The depth and breadth of the discussion and debate about what constitutes a successful employee grievance program is interdisciplinary and complex. It focuses on the inevitable tension between management prerogatives and employee rights in the public workplace. At issue is the relationship between workplace justice and legitimacy and its effect on organization efficiency and effectiveness. The author contends that workplace justice and organization success are closely tied to the legitimate actions of first-line supervisors and human resource managements' abilities to design institutions capable of fulfilling their social responsibilities in self-preserving ways. This will require a better understanding of how formal employee grievance procedures alter cooperative, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms for resolving employees' workplace concerns, complaints, and disputes in public organizations.

This case study extends legalization research to the public administration field by exploring how the legal environment of complex public organizations transforms social processes for resolving employee disputes. Data analysis revealed that the legal environment constituted by the Commonwealth of Virginia Employee Grievance Program tends to result in the circumvention of immediate supervisors, thereby obviating their positional authority to resolve employee grievances in a nonadversarial way. Findings suggest that grievance procedures designed to mimic judicially legitimate process and procedure alter the way flexibility, trust, and shared meanings govern the essence of organizational relations and result in economic and systemic costs.

Recent efforts to reform government are challenging many of the basic theoretical and managerial assumptions of governance at the federal, state, and local levels. Under the political rubric of reinventing government, reform initiatives have devolved administrative decision making to more local levels. In practice this can result in ethical dilemmas for local government administrators as they attempt to reconcile constitutional governance, legal accountability and political environments with the search for flexibility, innovation, and productivity while mimicking private sector processes and practices. This article describes such an ethical dilemma faced by a local government human resource manager and fire chief who were confronted with the decision to succumb to political pressure from prominent citizens, volunteer fire chiefs and city council members to hire unqualified firefighter candidates, or to discount their input and reject the candidates. The authors describe the ethical dilemma and discuss the importance of practicing ethical leadership to build public trust and accountability in the responsible use of administrative discretion while pursuing the public interest.