Employee Representatives and a Good Working Life: Achieving Social and Communicative Sustainability for HRM

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review Report Sustainability

Communicative freedom of action for employee representatives: Achieving social and communicative sustainability for HRM.

Review

The paper has an interesting and worthwhile topic. However, some major reorganisations are needed before the paper is ready to be published.

Major issues

The aim (purpose) of the paper is not clearly stated. This should be clearly stated at the end of the introduction. Several aims emerge at different places in the paper and a focused aim of the paper need to be communicated to the reader.

The term employee representative needs to be defined early on in the paper, preferably in the introduction.

Since there is no clear aim of the paper it is hard to follow the presentation and the dignity of the empirical study. I suggest that you either drop the empirical results altogether and focus on the review of the literature (and formulate this as the aim of the paper) OR that you much clearer state the aim and contribution of the empirical study and make rearrangements in the paper.

From the above-mentioned point, the paper needs to be rearranged and given more illustrative headings (following the IMRaD structure). Suggestion: Keep the introduction and let it end with a cleary stated aim; rename the following section and call it Review of the literature (then you can keep the headings 2-5 as subheadings in the section). Rename section six to Material and methods. You also need a discussion section in which you compare and reflect on your empirical results with the support of theory.

Minor issues

Title: you may consider using the term “good life” in the title.

Method: who performed the interviews? Did you do it with the help of an interpreter?

Section seven seems to be a discussion of the results. This needs to be highlighted.

Conclusions should succinctly state the conclusions of the present study without the use of references.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1

Thank you for your helpful review. Your comments were critical in helping us improve the quality of our manuscript. We have addressed your comments below in the order in which you presented them. Your comments are in bold face, and our responses are in regular type.

The paper has an interesting and worthwhile topic. However, some major reorganisations are needed before the paper is ready to be published.

Thank you for your comment – we are happy to learn that you consider our paper to address a relevant topic.

Major issues - The aim (purpose) of the paper is not clearly stated. This should be clearly stated at the end of the introduction. Several aims emerge at different places in the paper and a focused aim of the paper need to be communicated to the reader.

Thank you for your observation – we now provide an overview of the paper and its aim at the end of the introduction.

The term employee representative needs to be defined early on in the paper, preferably in the introduction.

Thank you for pointing out that we failed to include a definition of employee representatives. We included a proper definition.

Since there is no clear aim of the paper it is hard to follow the presentation and the dignity of the empirical study. I suggest that you either drop the empirical results altogether and focus on the review of the literature (and formulate this as the aim of the paper) OR that you much clearer state the aim and contribution of the empirical study and make rearrangements in the paper.

Thank you for pointing out this shortcoming. We cut selected section and tried to link the literature review more strongly with the study presented in the paper.  

From the above-mentioned point, the paper needs to be rearranged and given more illustrative headings (following the IMRaD structure). Suggestion: Keep the introduction and let it end with a cleary stated aim; rename the following section and call it Review of the literature (then you can keep the headings 2-5 as subheadings in the section). Rename section six to Material and methods. You also need a discussion section in which you compare and reflect on your empirical results with the support of theory.

Thank you for your suggestion. We renamed the section and adapted the paper structure.  

Minor issues - Title: you may consider using the term “good life” in the title.

Thank you for your suggestion – we adapted our title and changed it to reflect the paper’s focus on the good life.

Method: who performed the interviews? Did you do it with the help of an interpreter?

Thank you for your comment – we included more information on the data collection in the revised manuscript.  

Section seven seems to be a discussion of the results. This needs to be highlighted.

We renamed the section – it is now called Discussion of Results.

Conclusions should succinctly state the conclusions of the present study without the use of references.

Thank you for your comment – we removed all references from this section and reworked it considerably.

Once again, we truly appreciate your guidance. Your comments were extremely valuable in improving the quality of the manuscript. We worked diligently to address your concerns. We are most hopeful that you will be satisfied with the revision. If you have additional comments, we welcome them.

Reviewer 2 Report

^{The Authors submitted a very interesting article for review. In the paper they bridged existing SRHRM literature with an organizational communication perspective and introduced the employee representative as holding moral agency and communicative responsibility. The article is well written, the research done is valuable and  the number of literature items, on which the analysis was based, is impressive (despite the fact that the share of the literature items from 2019-2020 in the total number of items could be grater).}

^{There are some elements of the article that could be strenghtened:}

• ^{the choice of key words could be reconsidered,}
• ^{the Authors could emphasize more in the Introduction part what was the goal of their research,}
• ^{parts 2-5 could stand simply for the "Theoretical background" part,}
• ^{Why the Authors focused on (1) the German model, (2) the French model, (3) the Anglo-187Saxon model, and (4) the Scandinavian model when making the intenational comparison? The comparison was based only on those European countries - maybe it would be worth adding some information from e.g. the North East European countries?}
• ^{in the 6.1 - the Authors claim that they conducted interviews with representatives from 6 countries, but then they refer to 7 of them,}
• ^{doubts about the correctness of the research process are raised by the participation of nearly 68% of the representatives of the German model - in this case wouldn't it be worth preparing a case study?}
  
• ^{one cannot ignore the fact that the research was carried out 5-7 years ago, which raises doubts about its topicality,}
• ^{the style of Table 1 needs to be improved,}
• ^{the Discussion part should definitely be extracted from the Research results part.}

 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2

Thank you for your helpful comments and criticisms, which were central in helping us to improve the manuscript. We have addressed your comments below in the order in which they were presented. Your comments are in bold face, and our responses are in regular type.

The Authors submitted a very interesting article for review. In the paper they bridged existing SRHRM literature with an organizational communication perspective and introduced the employee representative as holding moral agency and communicative responsibility. The article is well written, the research done is valuable and  the number of literature items, on which the analysis was based, is impressive (despite the fact that the share of the literature items from 2019-2020 in the total number of items could be grater).

Thank you for your comment – we are happy to learn that you consider our paper to address a relevant topic.

There are some elements of the article that could be strenghtened:

the choice of key words could be reconsidered,

the Authors could emphasize more in the Introduction part what was the goal of their research,

parts 2-5 could stand simply for the "Theoretical background" part.

Thank you for your suggestion. We added some additional key words, included the goal of our research in the introduction and combined selected sections into the paper’s theoretical background.

Why the Authors focused on (1) the German model, (2) the French model, (3) the Anglo-187Saxon model, and (4) the Scandinavian model when making the intenational comparison? The comparison was based only on those European countries - maybe it would be worth adding some information from e.g. the North East European countries?

Thank you for your observation. The choice of countries was conditioned to our ability to access particular markets (countries) more readily than others. However, we purposely chose countries that represent different models.

in the 6.1 - the Authors claim that they conducted interviews with representatives from 6 countries, but then they refer to 7 of them, doubts about the correctness of the research process are raised by the participation of nearly 68% of the representatives of the German model - in this case wouldn't it be worth preparing a case study?

Thank you for your comment – in fact, we conducted interviews in 7 countries (we changed the number in the revised manuscript). We thought it would be nice to reflect the statements of countries with a strong culture with statements of countries of a weak culture to support our reasoning. We purposely got a larger sample in the Austria/Germany to find support for the numerous roles employee representatives occupy as discussed in literature.

one cannot ignore the fact that the research was carried out 5-7 years ago, which raises doubts about its topicality,

You are correct – this is definitely a shortcoming. We included this is the limitations section, which we added to the paper.

the style of Table 1 needs to be improved,

Thank you for your recommendation. We changed Table 1 considerably – we simplified it and also discussed it in more detail in the running text.

the Discussion part should definitely be extracted from the Research results part.

Thank you for your suggestion. We separated the two parts.

Once again, we truly appreciate your guidance. Your comments were extremely valuable in improving the quality of the manuscript. We worked diligently to address your concerns. We are most hopeful that you will be satisfied with the revision. If you have additional comments, we welcome them.  

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for adhering to my comments. The paper is now much improved and is, after some small revisions, ready to be published.