Exercising Managerial Prerogatives: The Findings of Four Field Studies

Abstract

Competitive pressures in the 1980s instigated a wave of managerial initiatives designed to cut costs, loosen work rules, and tighten discipline. Because previous field research on the day‐to‐day give‐and‐take between management and labor was done in an era in which unions were the moving force, a void exists in the literature. Described here are four field studies on managers exercising their prerogatives between formal collective‐bargaining negotiations. These patterns of behavior are compared to the adversarial and cooperative models that prevail in the fields of industrial relations and organization behavior. Rather than resembling either one model or the other, these case studies reflect a continuum of behavior. Since many people in the academic and managerial communities define "cooperative" and "adversarial" strategies somewhat differently, further research in mis area seems warranted, [management prerogatives, discipline, grievance procedure, fractional bargaining, negotiation]