Union effectiveness: it ain't watcha do - it's the way that you do it - that's what gets results

The main theme of this paper is an overview of the main approaches to organisational effectiveness and to examine the extant studies into union effectiveness. Research attention to the subject of organisational effectiveness has been considerable over recent years. Yet despite the large volume of research effort, it appears that there is little agreement as to what organisational effectiveness is, or indeed, how to measure it. Various approaches have been proposed ranging from the rational-goal approach to the competing-values approach. Generally speaking, two generic theoretical approaches - the rational-goal and the systems approach appear to capture the essence of organisational effectiveness. Rather surprisingly, there appears to have been little systematic effort to apply theories of organisational effectiveness to a union context, both internationally, and in Australia. What has emerged however, from these studies is that internal democracy is an important variable associated with perceptions of union effectiveness.