As a farewell gift to employees, customers and taxpayers, one of the top managers of the railways in Belgium, Marc Descheemaecker, wrote a book in March 2014 with his observations in this organization. A key message is directed at the unions, present in the organization and works council. He accuses the unions of blocking any serious innovation, and an unwillingness to renew themselves. They appear 'difficult', 'arrogant', 'incompetent', 'conservative' and 'too powerful'. Their attitude and actions are at high costs for organization and society, according to this CEO. Unions answered that they were pleased he had left the organization. This is just one example of many cases filling the newspapers daily, of conflicting relations between employers and employees in organizations. The relation between employers, employee representatives (ERs) and unions is delicate, often conflictive, however also with a lot of potential, as the following two examples illustrate.Paul Nijhoff is a former CEO of Wehkamp.nl. This is one of the most successful online retailers in the Netherlands, winning all kinds of awards, and with double digit growth figures year after year. Nijhoff praises the excellent cooperation with the works council and the unions, in the complete turnover of Wehkamp (the old and almost dead post order company), to Wehkamp.nl. Cooperation was needed, as almost 50 % of the employees were redundant and a good social plan had to be developed, while at the same time many new people had to be recruited. A key factor to this successful transition was a close cooperation and creative social dialogue in the organization. There were no collective actions by employees, and due to a good and proactive social plan almost all employees leaving the company found new jobs.

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The model of social dialogue in organisations between management and employees is facing unprecedented challenges, and changing rapidly. In this new context of labour relations, experiences and expectations of each other are key drivers for the primary parties within this social dialogue. There has been little systematic research investigating the conditions for constructive social dialogue, particularly when it comes to 'soft factors', such as perceived competences, trust, influence and conflict behaviours. Addressing these issues based on theories of conflict, trust and influence, this article investigates the experiences and expectations of employee representatives (ERs) by human resource (HR) managers, their counterparts in social dialogue. The results of surveys conducted in 11 European countries indicate that, overall, employers found a model of structured dialogue with elected employee representatives useful. Furthermore, competences of ERs, cooperative conflict behaviours, informal relations and trust promoted the influence of ERs on organisational decision making and the quality of these decisions. We discuss implications for different systems of industrial relations. JEL code: J50

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