Assessing the impact of employee involvement in decision-making and management prerogative in the Australian mining sector through legislative lens

Employee involvement in decision making and its influence on management’s discretion is a prominent research issue in industrial relations. This study examines the scope of employee involvement in the legislative system and the impact of employee involvement in decision-making and management prerogative within mining sector in Australia. Employee involvement can be managed by two different mechanisms: right based and interest based driven by legislative and management respectively. Over the last two decades, right based employee involvement in Australia is governed by enterprise agreements; for this reason, enterprise agreements from the mining sector are selected as the data source and will be used to examine the research objectives. Based on the nature of the data, this research uses the qualitative research methodology and content analysis to examine and analyse the subjective data within the documents. Following legislative lens to examine the employee involvement enables a formal and indirect employee involvement approach. However, the findings illustrate that the existence of informal and direct employee involvement practices under enterprise agreement too. In addition, this study identifies the impact of employee involvement on decision making and management prerogative. Altogether, this study highlights the integrative practice of right based and interest based- approach of employee involvement under contemporary Australian IR legislation. Such an outcome contributes to the industrial relations (IR) literature as well as provides insight to the organisational management practice about developing constructive employment relationship through employee involvement mechanisms.