Management and Industrial Relations Practices and Outcomes in Australian Workplaces 

Poor industrial relations performance can be costly for firms. In particular, employee quits, employee absence, industrial action and substandard relations between management and employees can all be detrimental to the firm. Using the 1995 Australian Workplace and Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS), this paper examines how particular human resource management techniques and industrial relations settings can influence the industrial relations outcomes of Australian workplaces. The results indicate that unions have played an important role in affecting performance outcomes. They also suggest that, although particular human resource management techniques can have an influence on performance, there is no single bundle of human resource management policies that can be applied across workplaces to affect measures of performance in the same way.