Abstract
Through trade unions are mostly viewed as employee organizations protecting employee‟s interests, they have political dimension too. Politicization of employee unions has added an extra complexity not only to their behavior, but also to their impact on organizations in industrial relations. Therefore, this political dimension of employee unions has to be taken into account in studies on unions. Researchers have identified two dimensions of union politicization namely political instrumentality and political ideology. Measurement of union politicization should incorporate both the political instrumentality and political ideology dimensions of union politicization. However, past researches have used either the political instrumentality or political ideology in measuring union politicization depending on their research context. The aim of this study is to test the goodness of measure of the union politicization in Sri Lankan Context. Data was collected from 136 public sector employee selected using stratified random sampling. Exploratory factor analysis and reliability testing were applied for testing the validity and reliability of the measurement. It was found that both political instrumentality and political belief dimensions are validly and reliably held in explaining the union politicization in Sri Lankan context. Further, results and implications are discussed so that it can be used for future research on union politicization.
Highlights
Unions as employee organizations and employees‟ behavior as union members have been subjective to an extensive research over the past decades (Parks, Gallagher, and Fullagar, 1995)
It is due to the fact that employee unions bring important implications to the industrial relation climate of organizations, and to the overall functioning of them (Wickens, 2008)
Since the very objective of this study is to test the goodness of the union politicization measurement adapted, factor analysis was done again by excluding the workplace instrumentality items and the result is given in the table II
Summary
Unions as employee organizations and employees‟ behavior as union members have been subjective to an extensive research over the past decades (Parks, Gallagher, and Fullagar, 1995). It is due to the fact that employee unions bring important implications to the industrial relation climate of organizations, and to the overall functioning of them (Wickens, 2008). Union research in recent years has placed an increased emphasis on organizational and behavioral approach to the study of employee unions (Parks, et al, 1995). Due to this renewal interest, some behavioral aspects related to unions, have been extensively explored. Union commitment (Snape, Redman, & Chan, 2000), union loyalty and union satisfaction, (Iverson & Kuruvilla, 1995), union participation (Fuller & Hester, 1998) and pro union attitudes and union instrumentality (Chan, TongQing, Redman and Snape, 2006) have been explored
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