Abstract
Organisations tend to have an increasingly individualistic management. Indeed, since wages have been individualised and workers paid according to individual appraisals, collective bargaining has lost weight in the employment relationship and the employee representation is hence weakened as Unions have less power to negotiate. The current organisational culture stresses on individualism and removes collective representation through Trade Unions (Noon & Blyton, 1999). However, some organisations try to keep this individualism even though they practice unitarist management. This kind of management aims, for both employer and employees, at sharing a common organisational goal. Employees are required to play the ‘needed role behaviour' as Bratton & Gold (1999) explained, and seek recognition and good employment relationship. They also emphasise on the importance of training rather than promotion in pluralist organisations (Personnel Management, 1993). The pluralist organisations are opposite to unitarist ones since employees tend to obtain the best they can from the organisation without investing themselves in a strong culture and their interests are contradictory with those of management. The main difference between those two types of management regarding the representation system is that Trade Unions are accepted as a legitimate challenge to managerial rule in pluralist organisations whereas Industrial Relations are no longer perceived by management as the central activity and representation of employees and negotiation with trade unions are avoided in unitarist organisations (Collins, 1995). The moot point that stems for unitarist companies is whether Trade Unions have a role to play in such organisations where no conflict appears...
