CHRM Research Activities

Justice Issues and Disadvantaged Workers

The overall aim of this project is to investigate justice issues in the contemporary Australian workplace. There are three separate studies. These comprise an investigation into the wages and conditions of Vietnamese textile outworkers in Victoria , an analysis of Australian sex tourism, and a study of justice outcomes of employment contracts that characterise the modern organisation.

Project Director: Associate Professor Christina Cregan

Pay and Performance Management Systems

Pay is central to the employment relationship and therefore a potentially powerful tool for affecting employee and organisational performance. Performance based pay adjustment systems rely on the effective systems for the measurement of employee performance. We currently have two projects investigating the implications of performance management systems for a range of organisational outcomes.

The first project investigates the role of employee cynicism on a range of employee performance indicators. We have collected data from matched pairs of employees and supervisors. The second project examines the feedback processes in performance appraisal, with a particular emphasis on negative feedback. We are in the process of collecting data from managers on the strategies for providing negative feedback.

Project Director: Associate Professor Michelle Brown

Human Resource Management in Asia

Events over the past decade, including the Asian financial crisis, the reactions to 1997 and the current economic crisis and the economic and political changes that have taken place in Asia, means much of what we know about Asia is outdated and may well be irrelevant. The specific aim of the project is to explore and analyse what has happened to HRM in a number of Asian countries over this period, to map the responses to these changes and to examine the effects on companies, trade unions, workers and their families.

The project sponsored an international workshop on Trade Unions in Asia in March 2006. A book associated with the project was published in 2008 (Benson, J. & Zhu, Y. (2008). Trade Unions in Asia: An economic and sociological analysis. Routledge” London).

Project Director: Associate Professor Ying Zhu

Employee Participation, Involvement and Democracy at Work

Employee involvement in decisions at work is a perennial theme in industrial relations, HRM, sociology and psychology. Debates about the appropriateness or otherwise of employee input to decisions continue to attract interest not only from academic researchers but also practitioners and policy makers. In spite of the interest this topic generates there remain relatively few rigorous and detailed studies of it. The project is designed to subject debates about involvement to empirical scrutiny using both quantitative and qualitative methods and thus to provide a sound basis on which to advance knowledge and to inform policy and practice.

We recently conducted a survey of aged-care nurses in Australia which explored links between job design and employee involvement, which produced a paper presented at the International Labour Process Conference in London in April. Currently we are developing a comparative research project with colleagues in the UK , to examine patterns of employee involvement across industries.

Project Director: Professor Bill Harley