Impact of Employee Unionization on Work Related Behavior: A Preliminary Study on Private and Public Sector Organizations in Sri Lanka

Abstract

One of the distinct characteristic of the industrial relation climate of both the public and private sector organization is that they have highly unionized work environment. Further, most of employee unions are highly piliticized. This have created a challenging organizational context for the managers of these organizations. The higher unionization of employees and politicization of employee unions have brought severe managerial and economic implications. On the other hand, some of the dimensions of unionization such as union commitment affect to the behaviour of employees directly and expected employee outcomes in turn. Understanding of this effects of employee unionization on employees’ outcomes is highly required for managers to formulate better strategies for dealing with employee unionization. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of employee unionization on employees’ outcomes in Sri Lankan Context. A sample of 100 employees from both private and public sector were drawn as the sample of the study using proportionate stratified random sampling method. A questionnaire was administered to collect the data. Based on literature review, it was hypothesized that union commitment and union politicization are negatively associated with employees’ outcomes. Data was analysed with correlation analysis. It was found that both union commitment and union politicization are negatively and significantly associated with organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behaviour of employee. Further, it was revealed that employee unionization has higher negative association with employees’ outcomes in the public sector than in the private sector. The findings of this study highlights the fact that high level of unionization negatively affect to the employees outcomes in Sri Lankan context which bring some practical implications to the managing of employees. However, since this is a preliminary study of a more deep empirical study, these conclusions should be taken cautiously.