Unofficial action by groups of workers ranging from the Garda to train drivers and scaffolders threatened "the return of the bad old days of trench war industrial relations", the chairman of the Institute of Personnel and Development (IPD), Mr Dave Keenan, told the IPD conference.
Such disputes created situations "where the winner takes all and the concepts of partnership, competitiveness and logic are blown up in the first assault".
Mr Keenan, human resources manager at the Educational Building Society, said that the most recent dispute, involving scaffolders, "seems to have the tacit support of the union involved, and all this at a time of national partnership and a national pay agreement". He called on all concerned to "act responsibly and in particular the trade unions, who have a critical leadership role to play in averting unofficial action".
Change is now part of organisational life, said the chief executive of the Irish Productivity Centre, Mr Tom McGuinness. Recent studies had shown that 90 per cent of organisations were implementing significant change initiatives at any one time.
These could vary from strategic shifts, such as the introduction of new products and services, or setting new business goals, to operational issues, such as pay levels, new plant and work practices. Most organisations were successful at developing "hard technical knowledge and competence", but were less effective at cultivating "soft technological skills", or "flexibility and agility of response to changes in the environment".
Bodies such as the IPC often had "to deal with the resulting fallout". It had developed a New Work Organisation programme jointly with IBEC and the ICTU to do so.
This was based on new assumptions such as the stakeholder concept, which recognised that every group within an enterprise had to recognise the interests of other groups and collaborate in finding solutions to problems. The new structures which emerged would depend on the size and complexity of organisations, Mr McGuinness said.
But among the features likely to emerge were: a joint high-level group to establish overall policies and explain the rationale for change, steering or co-ordinating groups to oversee operational changes; and task groups which could research and resolve problems where they occurred.
Such changes posed major challenges to the key actors, be they managers, trade union or direct employee representatives, he said.
Human resource managers, in particular, needed to move from simply directing people to becoming "a change agent, facilitator, relationship builder and ultimately integrator of the business prerogative with the aspirations of the people in the organisation", Mr McGuinness said.
