Managerial Perception of Unionization and Its Effect in Sri Lankan Public Sector Organizations

Abstract

Public sector organizations in Sri Lanka are characterized with high unionization of their employees. This has created a unique context, where managers of these organizations face a problem of managing them with the conventional thought of management. Most of the public sector organizations have failed to achieve the expected level of performance which has caused criticism against them. Therefore, there is a need of a study to explore this situation prevailing in the public sector organizations in Sri Lanka. As a first step of a series of empirical exploration, an attempt was made to understand the issues of employee unionization in the public sector organizations in Sri Lanka. A purposive sample of fifty middle and lower level managers of the public sector organizations was drawn. A self developed questionnaire was administered among respondents, and data was analyzed with the tools of descriptive analysis such as frequency distribution, mean and median. Since this is a preliminary study, the attempt was made to understand the union perception of managers of the public sector organizations in Sri Lanka. It was found that managers differ in their perception of unionization and the effect of unionization varies at different managerial activities. Among them, decision making, implementation and evaluation were found to be mostly affected by the employee unionization. Further, it was found that perceived performance ranged along with the perception of managers and strategies dealing with unionized employees. However, a deep and rigorous study is needed to understand this complex contextual scenario.