Uppfattningar om ansvar - En kvalitativ studie av ett fackförbunds personalarbete

Abstract

In the year 2015 the Swedish work environment authority ”Arbetsmiljöverket” issued the regulation and general recommendation on organizational and social work environment (2015:4) to prevent psychosocial illness at work. Employers in Sweden are responsible for their organizations’ work environment, but this responsibility is often delegated to line managers, and HR often supports the employer in assuring a good work environment. The work environment affects all employees in an organization and is therefore a subject that must be a priority for every employer. In the regulation and general recommendation on organizational and social work environment it is stated that employees should not be subjected to too high workload, and that the employer need to assure that the employees know what is expected of them. Despite this, in the year 2017 only 60 percent of the swedish employees knew what their employers expected of them regarding their work. This sort of unclear work objectives is a factor that leads to illness. On the other hand to insure health for employees but also increase motivation and employment engagement, there are health enhancing factors that can be considered. For examples are increased control and explicit work goals important. This study is concerning a labour union where the financial accountants are elected every two years and automatically become responsible for HR. The aims of this study are to identify two things, firstly how HR is functioning based on the personnel managers' conceptions, and secondly whether or not there is a divergence between the labour union’s own conducted HR-work, and the HR-work they themselves want other employers to achieve. Since conceptions are focused, the method for this study is phenomenography which means that the empirics mainly have been conducted through interviews that got transliterated and thereafter shaped 2 into categories of description. The literature that has been used to analyse the empirics in this study is uppermost theory regarding psychosocial wellbeing such as the demand-control-support model and role theory, with focus on role ambiguity and role conflict. The result shows a large variation between the personnel managers in conceptions regarding the HR-practices in their organization. The majority perceive that the HR-practices have improved since the last congressional where the labour union for example decided to upgrade their HR-practices by having the personnel managers developing new knowledge in some HR-areas. Furthermore the personnel managers do not have any job description, which the majority of the personnel managers conceive would facilitate their HR-work. At the same time, the personnel managers have diversified conceptions regarding whom they are responsible for. Despite the lack of job description and ambiguity regarding the division of responsibilities, not all personnel managers conceive that there is a divergence between the labour union’s own conducted personnel work and the personnel work they themselves want other employers to work for. Still the majority perceive that there is such a divergence.