Interventions for Building Trust and Negotiating Integrative Agreements Between Management and Works Council

Abstract

This chapter describes three interventions performed by one or more of the authors, in order to simultaneously build trust and negotiate substantial deals between management of organizations vis-à-vis employee representatives in their role as works council members. The first intervention case was aimed at restoring trust between management and works council, who experienced various conflicts of interests. The second case aimed at reinforcing trust between management and works council that was still fragile. In the third case, we used trust-reassuring methods to enable an innovative bargaining agreement between management and works council. The three interventions show that by addressing trust issues explicitly, using work methods that help parties express themselves in safe and transparent ways, management and works councils are able to negotiate integrative agreements. Social innovation is then likely to result, due to agreeing on and implementing practices that help organizations as well as their employees to develop optimally.