Bridging the work governance divide: pluralism and performance

This article introduces a new direction of studies that looks at the Workplace of the Future through enlarged interdisciplinary lenses. In particular, this article bridges the divide between different traditions - human resource management, industrial relations, and economic democracy – arguing theoretically and demonstrating empirically their complementarity in designing a workplace that better responds to the challenges posed by increasingly conflicting demands, such as: flexibility and safeguards; quality of life and quality of productive output; diversity of workforce; and diversity of contexts and institutions. We hypothesize and find (using the largest available dataset on work-related systems CRANET) that the response may lie in adopting ‘pluralist’ work governance models, blending mechanisms that differ in kind and are recommended by different disciplinary traditions: ‘highly powered incentives’, worker representation and voice rights, communitarian practices, and formal personnel systems. We also show that pluralist systems in the ‘private governance’ sphere are complementary with strong labour-related institutions in the ‘public governance’ of work; and indicate how those findings can lead to a better understanding of how to take into account institutions, such as governments, regulations, and industries, in shaping and designing the workplace of the Future. In particular, the finding that a pluralist configuration consistently outperforms other configurations across industries and countries suggests that a pluralist trait may be a universally valid attribute of workplace governance, even though the specific mechanisms that create that variety are different and context-dependent.