There are wide variations in the means workers prefer to use to assert their interests at the workplace. Generally, workers with good educations and high occupational status are more likely to assert their interests individually rather than through collective bargaining. When organized, higher-level professionals such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and middle managers tend to act through occupational associations rather than in broad-based unions with blue-collar workers.

This occupational or professional approach helps to create and reinforce the professional ties and status of these groups as well as to bring their special needs to the attention of employers. Moreover, these groups tend to rely on the power they derive from their labour market and geographic mobility along with professional norms, licensing or certification procedures, and government-passed standards as much as, if not more than, they rely on collective bargaining. Teachers and other white-collar government employees represent a significant exception to this tendency. In the United States and many European countries, some of the fastest growing and most powerful unions represent government employees (such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees). Moreover, in some European countries an increasing number of white-collar and professional employees in the private sector have organized into unions and now negotiate collectively with their employers.

It should be noted that blue-collar workers who have highly marketable skills derive individual bargaining power from their potential mobility. In general, however, blue-collar workers around the world are more likely to form unions and bargain collectively to promote and protect their interests.

How strongly do workers wish to take part in decisions that affect them? Do they want to be coequals with management on issues, or are their interests more limited? Such questions have been at the centre of historic debates among industrial relations scholars, practicing managers, union leaders, and public policymakers. The evidence is surprisingly robust over time and across national boundaries: workers reveal the greatest interest in participating in decisions that affect their immediate economic concerns and those that directly affect their specific job.

Survey data collected from workers across 12 European and North American countries show that the majority of employees want a say in workplace decisions such as how they are to perform their jobs, how jobs are organized, and how problems related to their immediate environment are solved. An equally strong majority want a say on bread-and-butter economic issues such as wages, benefits, and safety and health conditions. Only a minority favour direct participation or indirect representation in the broad strategic business decisions normally made by high-level executives or a firm’s board of directors. The one strategic issue that workers demonstrate real interest in influencing, however, is the role of new technologies at the workplace. When they can see a link between strategic managerial decisions and their own long-term economic and career interests, workers want to have a voice in those decisions.

Given these broadly shared values and expectations, some of the particular work and career concerns of various occupational and demographic groups are examined below.

In all industrialized countries managers are typically recruited from among university or postsecondary technical-school graduates. Although there are exceptions to this pattern, it is becoming rare for blue-collar workers without a college or technical-school degree to rise beyond the level of first-line supervision into the ranks of higher management. Yet because few graduates fresh out of a university or technical school have the experience or background necessary to assume broad-based or high-level managerial responsibilities, most organizations invest heavily in systematic management training and development efforts. Moreover, there has been a great expansion in post-graduate management education in the United States. This trend is also taking hold in Europe.

An initial part of typical on-the-job training often involves socialization into the practices, values, and culture of the organization. Another source of training and development lies in the career paths and job rotation policies of the firm. One large multinational firm, for example, devised a 10-year management development plan for all its junior managers, assuming that within those 10 years the manager would change jobs at least five times. Each job change was expected to expose the junior manager to a different functional area, such as marketing, finance, technology or product development, and manufacturing. Each job change also was expected to increase either the level of responsibility or the number of people the manager supervised. This firm, like an increasing number of others, attempted to include international experience in the career path, especially for those young managers targeted early in their careers as having the potential to rise to the level of senior management.

Many firms make an explicit judgment of this potential early in a manager’s career and put those thought to have the most potential onto a “fast track” developmental path. In smaller professional organizations, such as law offices or consulting firms, a similar decision is made within the first five to seven years on whether to promote an individual to the status of partner in the firm. This “up or out” decision is analogous to promotion to tenure of faculty members in most universities at some point prior to the seventh year of service.

Researchers have shown that managerial career patterns can be predicted quite accurately by the results of these early promotional outcomes. Some have used the analogy of a tournament to describe the process, in which “losing” at any step along the way significantly reduces one’s chance of “winning”—that is, getting to the top of an organization or profession. Thus, a failure to get a promotion one expects (or that others expect a manager to get) often is a signal for the manager to look for opportunities in another organization.