Mutual interests management with a purposive approach: Evidence from the Turkish shipyards for an amorphous impact model between (subjective) well‐being and performance

• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Author: Surhan Cam,Serap Palaz
• Date: 01 January 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12388

DOI: 10.1111/irj.12388

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Mutual interests management with a

purposive approach: Evidence from the

Turkish shipyards for an amorphous impact

model between (subjective) well‐being and

performance

Surhan Cam

1

|Serap Palaz

2

1

School of Social Sciences, Cardiff

University, Cardiff, Wales, UK

2

Bandirma Onyedi Eylul University,

Bandırma, Turkey

Correspondence

Surhan Cam, School of Social Sciences,

Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK.

Email: cams@cardiff.ac.uk

Funding information

British Council

Abstract

To enhance the academic endeavours confronting the

globalisation of managerial orthodoxy (predicated on

antagonising the interests of companies and employ-

ees), we will investigate the relationship between

institutional performance and employees' (subjective)

wellbeing in Turkish shipyards by undertaking an

extensive survey. We will argue that there is a positive

association between the two covariates that lends itself

to a conceptual frame of Mutual Interests Management

(MIM). The MIM refers to the managerial impacts that

result in cross‐fertilisations between the interests of

companies and employees. However, we will also

argue that MIM has a dynamic and amorphous

character in the sense that no correlation whether it

be positive, negative or the lack of thereof necessarily

survives through our purposive analyses with the trial

of various interaction models among the specific types

and combinations of variables considered. Accordingly,

the conclusion stresses that the amorphous nature of

MIM can be adapted by the managers at company‐level

to tailor or innovate feasible MIM strategies.

Ind. Relat. 2023;54:40–70.40

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wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/irj

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

1|INTRODUCTION

Since the 1980s, the World has witnessed the globalisation of managerial orthodoxy premised

on the Tayloristic steering strategies (Taylor, 1911) with a misguided dogma of diametrical

antinomy between the cost and productivity/profitability of labour (Goldman & Van Houten,

1980; Madrick, 2012). With a long history dating back to the utopian ideas of the early 19th

century (Owen, 1819), the progressive attempts, generally speaking, to confront the managerial

orthodoxy, on the other hand, have experienced frustrating outcomes vis‐à‐vis their search for

harnessing the interests of companies and employees.

The recent resurgence in the bids to denounce ‘laissez‐faire belligerence’was blended with

both political and academic thrusts. Despite some interventions by the NGOs (Heery & Simms,

2008), much of the political resistance against ‘the harsh realities of capitalism’has been led by

the trade union movements such as ‘the reconstruction of corporate trade unionism’in France,

‘European trade unionism’to promote ‘corporate social responsibility’in a broader context

(Edmans, 2012) and the ‘partnership’discourses in the United Kingdom to a lesser extent

(Saridakis et al., 2017), in addition to the ‘social movement trade unionism’in developing

countries (Scipes, 1992). The demise of membership, especially in the West, nonetheless, has

become an impediment for the effectiveness of trade unions’struggle.

The early academic rebuttals of liberal abruptness were mostly led by the humanistic

management debates which had shifted the focus from the motivations issue rooted in the mid‐

20th century (Ryder, 1967) to the notion of organisational culture with a wishful appeal to the

shared values between firms and their employees (Daly, 1986). Then, as the aggressiveness of

managerialism has intensified, the humanistic agendas moved to the community‐centred

approaches after the turn of the millennium with an under‐substantiated emphasis on

employees’political aptitude outside the workplaces (Melé, 2003). A decade after, the weight

has begun to ebb toward condemnatory calls proposing the reconciliation of economic rational

and moral codes with no arresting impact on the managerial orthodoxy (Spitzeck, 2011).

In different settings, too, there were academic pursuits to confine the ‘anti‐labour

sentiment’without dissuasive attainments. Marxists interlockers, for example, have deplored it

reiterating the critique of exploitation and inequalities for surging to unprecedented levels in

the neo‐liberal era (Ramsay et al., 2000). Although the labour process theories had been the

spearheading genre within the critical schools until the early 1980s, their popularity has been

deteriorated by the loss of interest in the mezzo level accounts of industrial relations by and

large during the following decades (Procter & Rowlinson, 2011).

Over the past decade or so, micro/company level investigations have increasingly sought to

stimulate the profit instincts of employers by pointing to the positive bearings of employees’job

satisfaction (JS) and subjective wellbeing (SWB) on labour productivity (Hakim & Sudarmiatin,

2018). Even though to a limited degree, the benign affects have been referred to in terms of the

profitability of companies as well (Kersemaekers et al., 2018). A nationally representative

survey in the United Kingdom (Bryson et al., 2017) and a cross‐national analysis in Europe

(Addison & Teixeira, 2020) have particularly produced sanguine upshots. Crucially, the

relevance of JS/SWB to the institutional performance was also asserted to be resilient to the

conventionally influential intermediary factors such as establishment size, industrial/sectoral

variations and the national differences (Cam & Palaz, 2021; Mahy et al., 2011).

Nevertheless, the micro/company level studies have culminated in the reproduction of

some ‘inconsistent’results in the literature as will be stipulated later. It is important to

underline here that disconcerted research narratives keep hampering theoretical

AMORPHOUS MIM AND PERFORMANCE

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