As noted earlier, it is common in HRM literature toassumethat performance
gains from new forms of work organization accrue by virtue of their positive
impact on employees. It is noteworthy that, unlike LPT, there have been few
HRM studies which have sought to test this assumption (for an exception see
Guest 2002 ). A small body of work explicitly draws on LPT and has utilized survey
data to test associations between work organization and employee outcomes. A
series of papers by Harley ( 1999 , 2001 ), utilizing the Australian Workplace Indus-
trial Relations Survey (AWIRS) and the British WERS 98 survey, examines links
between work organization and employee outcomes including discretion, satisfac-
tion, commitment, stress, and work intensity. These analyses, which seek to assess
both LPT and HRM claims, consistently fail toWnd associations between ‘empow-
ering’ forms of work and team-based work on one hand and employee outcomes,
either positive or negative, on the other. Ramsay et al. ( 2000 ) also explicitly adopt a
LPT perspective and seek to test both LPT-inspired and HRM-inspired models of
the impact of work organization on employees. This study, utilizing the WERS 98
dataset, found that while some progressive labor management practices were
associated with positive employee outcomes (supporting the conventional HRM
view), some were also associated with negative employee outcomes (supporting the
LPT view).
- 1 Insights from Labor Process Theory
To summarize LPT-informed research on work organization—the qualitative
studies have generally found negative impacts on employees, while the quantitative
studies have found either no eVect or mixed eVects. From a methodological
perspective, the diVerences between the results of qualitative and quantitative
studies are not diYcult to square. In terms of making generalizations about the
impact of work organization, we must fall back on the large-scale quantitative
studies. The fact that the quantitative studies show that there are sometimes
positive outcomes as well as negative outcomes, and sometimes none at all,
suggests that the impact of new forms of work organization varies. The strength
of qualitative studies is that they allow us to understandhowwork organization has
an impact on employees. We cannot generalize as far from the results, but these
studies provide us with a way of understanding the potential for and nature of
negative outcomes. There is nothing in LPT which says that there will necessarily be
a simple logic of opposition in which anything management does will necessarily
have a negative impact on employees, although it does suggest that while produc-
tion takes place within capitalism, there are constraints on the extent to which
work organization can lead to ‘win-win’ outcomes. The concept of ‘structured
antagonism’ (Edwards 1990 ), discussed earlier, recognizes that in the employment
relationship there will always be (actual or potential) conXict, but simultaneously
there may be shared interests. If we accept this, then there is no inconsistency
between theWndings of quantitative and qualitative studies—the latter simply
156 paul thompson and bill harley