The organizational development literature has very largely ignored the role of trade unions, with the result that the traditional organizational change models are held to be unsuitable for analysing the establishment and maintenance of joint problem-solving structures. Accordingly in this article we draw on the mainstream industrial relations literature in order to develop a model which seeks to identify the relevant structural characteristics of plants that had voluntarily established joint health and safety commit tees. This model is tested by performing a multivariate analysis of data obtained from a survey of 970 establishments in the manufacturing sector in Britain.
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