文档介绍：原文:
Small firm responses to employment regulation
te Harris
The author
te Harris is Associate Head of HRM, Department of Human Resource Management, Nottingham Business School, The Nottingham Trent University, and Nottingham, UK.
Keywords
Procedures, Small-to medium-sized enterprises, Legislation, Regulation, Costs.
Abstract
Examines the impact of employment regulation on owner-manager approaches to the employment relationship at the level of the individual firm. While there was no reported principled opposition to extending employment rights as suggested by a number of earlier studies, the cumulative effect of recent legislation was perceived by owner-managers to be reducing petitiveness by placing costly and time-consuming demands on the smaller business. The case panies were increasingly formalizing their employment processes largely to defend their decisions against potential litigation. Despite certain acknowledged benefits, this increasing proceduralisation was held to be detrimental to the informality and flexibility viewed as essential to effective working relationships in the smaller enterprise. Continuing recruitment bined with the costs associated with expanding regulation led the majority of the case panies to identify an investment in automation and labor-saving equipment as a preferable long-term option to the expansion of the workforce.
Managerial and policy implications
There is little evidence of a principled objection to increasing employment regulation among owner-managers but they have growing concerns about its cumulative impact petitiveness and much of its appropriateness to the operational realities of SMEs.
Approaches to regulation and the employment relationship among owner-managers tend to be firm specific and embedded in the anizational context. Levels of reactivity or proactively are highly dependent on the values and knowledge of individual owner-managers, organizational history, a trade union presence and awareness of the work