The focus of industrial conflict has shifted from collective confrontation to grievances between employee and employer. This narrative review encompasses a range of international research on individual employee-employer grievances. The literature is reviewed in four key stages: (1) the incidence of grievable events; (2) the employee's response to a potential grievance issue; (3) the effectiveness of grievance processing; and (4) outcomes. The incidence of grievable events cannot be estimated precisely, because most are either not pursued by the employee or are settled informally (and so not recorded). Most research has been done on the second stage, investigating when a grievance will be pursued. The theoretical frame of exit, voice and loyalty, adapted from A.O. Hirschman (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) has been prominent, but a series of findings have challenged the validity of this model and suggest a range of competing theories which may explain the apparent conundrum of negative outcomes associated with formal grievance procedures. The role of power has regained prominence, and this is part of a fuller understanding of grievance outcomes. The focus has been on the employee perspective, and it is now timely to broaden the focus, modelling a progression through a sequence of stages and emphasizing the role of employers in designing and managing grievance processes which are effective and fair.

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There's buildings down everywhere here. We need as many units as possible." "We have got major damage. We have building collapses with people inside. We've got whole three-four storey complexes completely demolished." "We're gonna need fire here now. We've got buildings on fire now as well." (Police-radio communications immediately after the Christchurch earthquake)A series of severe earthquakes rocked the Canterbury region in New Zealand from 2010 to 2016. One of the most destructive was a M6.3 tremor centred near the heart of Christchurch, the largest city in the region. This event was particularly violent, with some of the highest peak ground accelerations ever recorded for this type of earthquake. Unlike the Northridge, USA, and Kobe, Japan earthquakes, the tremor struck at midday on a workday, causing 185 fatalities and thousands of injuries (Ardagh & Deely 2019). The effects were devastating, rating as the world's fifth-biggest insurance event at that time, with overwhelming damage to land, housing, physical infrastructure and businesses. That M6.3 tremor was just the start of an extremely prolonged disaster situation. Destructive aftershocks continued for many months afterwards, with a series of large and late tremors not typical of other earthquakes (Christophersen, Rhoades, Hainzl , Smith, & Gerstenberger, 2013). Much of the city's central business district remained closed for more than two years, and 70% of those buildings were demolished. Thousands of residents and businesses were displaced, with whole suburbs permanently abandoned, and major mental health challenges emerged among the population (Fergusson, Horwood, Boden, & Mulder, 2014). Business operations were severely compromised and this was compounded by the ongoing tremors, with over 8,000 aftershocks in twelve months. The city's critical infrastructure networks of roads, water, waste, and power remained significantly impaired for an extended period. Agencies were confronted with a massive scale of urgent reconstruction work. This was a complicated, extended-disaster setting, rather than a single event. It presented an extremely challenging environment for people and organisations, one that highlighted the paucity of evidence-based knowledge of resilience trajectories in relation to protracted adverse events. Earlier research into organisational resilience has tended to utilise either survey designs, or single organisations in a specific, time-defined disruption. In contrast, the Christchurch earthquake presented a rare opportunity for exploring organisational resilience in an extended crisis. It allowed our research team to study multiple organisations over a period of several years, as they simultaneously encountered wide-ranging disruptions, in a constantly changing environment.Our research programme involved an in-depth study of twelve lifeline 1 organisations. The organisations were diverse, ranging from those managing physical infrastructure of water and roads, through to financial services and communication providers. They all shared a c...

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