Perceived Effectiveness of Supervisory Leadership Behaviors in a Manufacturing-Union Environment

Labor unions have a significant impact on the economy in the United States and rest of the world. Although membership rate in unions has declined slowly over the last few decades, there were over 15 million unionized wage and salary employees in the United States alone in the year 2004 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). In addition, almost 13% of manufacturing employees were unionized last year (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2005). The impacts of unions on various measures of organizational effectiveness have been well researched. For instance, firms are more likely to incur lower investment in plant, equipment, and research and development if they are unionized (Bronars & Deere, 1993a; Hirsch 1991b, 1992). Similarly, unionization rates have positive impacts on labor productivity (Allen, 1984). In addition, unions have several implications for manufacturing supervision and leadership. For instance, unionized employees are believed to have different expectations from their work environment compared to their non-union counterparts (Bryson, Cappellari, & Lucifora, 2003; Hammer & Avgar, 2005). Hence, unionized employees may have different role expectations from their supervisors. For example, abiding by the labor contract and settling employee grievances are some of the key roles that supervisors have to fulfill in a union environment (e.g., Stanley, 2005). Similarly, certain leadership behaviors are positively associated with subordinates’ perceptions of leadership effectiveness. In particular, supervisors who scored highly on Leader Consideration behaviors (i.e., showing concern towards subordinates) had fewer employee grievances than supervisors who scored low on the Leader Consideration scale (Fleishman & Harris, 1962). Consideration and Initiation of Structure (i.e., task oriented behaviors) were the two main factors of leadership behavior put forth by Halpin and Winer (1957) and Fleishman, Harris, and Burtt (1956). Other researchers have explicated ten additional factors of leader behavior including Demand Reconciliation (i.e., reducing disorder to the system), Integration (i.e., resolving