The authors draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theories to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict firm-level quit rates, then empirically evaluate the predictive power of these variables using data from a 1998 establishmentlevel survey in the telecommunications industry. With respect to alternative voice mechanisms, they find that union representation predicts lower quit rates, even after they control for compensation and a wide range of other human resource practices that may be affected by collective bargaining. Also predicting lower quit rates is employee participation in offline problem-solving groups and in self-directed teams. No apparent association is found between quit rates and the availability of nonunion dispute resolution procedures. Regarding human resource practices, higher relative wages and internal promotion policies predict lower quit rates, and contingent staffing, electronic monitoring, and variable pay predict higher rates.High quit rates are a significant cost to organizations, both because they raise labor costs (Oi 1962) and because they lower organizational performance (for ex- ample, Norsworthy and Zabala 1986). Research in industrial relations has shown that unionized establishments have signifi-. This research is based on a multi-year study of the telecommunications services industry conducted in collaboration with Harry Katz and generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The authors thank Harry Katz for comments on prior versions of the draft andDanielle van Jaarsveld for her careful research assistance. cantly lower quit rates than nonunion establishments because they provide a voice mechanism through which employees can negotiate higher relative compensation and redress problems as an alternative to exit (Freeman and Medoff 1984). More recent research on "high commitment" or "high performance" work systems has shown that coherent sets of human resource practices lead to lower quit rates (for example, Arthur 1994) and better organizational performance (for example, Ichniowski etal. 1996), and that high quit rates undermine perfor-

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In the late 1970s and 1980s intensified international competition in motor vehicle manufacturing and sales was reflected by an increase in the share of the American market captured by imports. Some analysts argued that this increase reflected the low productivity of American automobile producers compared with that of Japanese and other foreign companies. Inflexible work rules or the adversarial nature of labor management relations was often blamed."

This case study of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) demonstrates the value of resource dependence and contingency organizational theories—two branches of organization theory, which has most commonly been used to interpret firm behavior—for analyzing union revitalization. Consistent with predictions of those theories, the CWA responded to a changed environment by abandoning strategies that no longer achieved organizational objectives, but retaining and bolstering strategies that continued to be effective. Furthermore, like the organizations analyzed in Jeffrey Pfeffer and Gerald Salancik's classic exposition of resource dependency theory, in the face of heightened environmental complexity and uncertainty the CWA used political action, growth strategies, and inter-organizational linkages to gain advantage. The CWA conformed to another prediction of contingency theory by using an integration strategy—specifically, by making simultaneous and interactive use of activities in collective bargaining, politics, and organizing—to spur innovation and respond to environmental complexity and uncertainty.

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