News

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - The Center for Workplace Performance will continue their webinar series on Wednesday, September 9 at 8:00 p.m. EST with a presentation from Robert B. McKersie, Professor Emeritus of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Program:

Understanding bargaining strategies are critical to our work as HRER professionals, particularly the difference between integrative and distributive bargaining. Whether we work in labor relations (collective bargaining, labor management committee activities) or in HR (facilitating meetings with organizational stakeholders, negotiating organizational policies and procedures) we all must understand bargaining options that might be more or less effective given each circumstance. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all alternative.

Robert McKersie will connect the same types of reflections to social protest movements, past and present. His analysis will help us appreciate our ability to adapt our decision-making strategies to very dynamic situations in which any one of us might be involved. Dr. McKersie was one of those in our profession who created the research that helped to establish bargaining as a legitimate area of study. His book with Robert Walton, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations: An Analysis of a Social Interaction System, is one of the foundational readings in our discipline.

HRCI Recertification Credits and CEUs:

Approval pending

Zoom Link:

Will be distributed to registrants the day of the meeting

Agenda: 

1. Bargaining strategies: integrative and distributive
2. Social protest movements in the 1960s
3. Social protest movements in the 2020s
4. Comparing and contrasting bargaining strategies between the two eras
5. What works?

Presenter Biography:

Professor Robert McKersie is one of the most important labor and employment relations scholars of our time.  His long career has bridged the academic world and the world of practice in an unprecedented way.  Professor McKersie has probably spent as much time as an observer, advisor, and mediator of some of the most important labor-management disputes and innovations, including the strike by workers at Harvard, the Saturn factory of the future project, and Presidential Commissions on Federal Pay and the Coal Industry, as he has writing or teaching about the field.  And he has used that access and involvement to inform the many books and articles in which he explains and analyzes the complex dynamics of labor-management relationships and offers practical strategies for improving collective bargaining and dispute resolution processes.  That is why the models and theories he has developed remain required reading for students decades after he developed them.

Beyond his role as a leading figure in the field of labor and employment relations, Professor McKersie’s insights and experience in conflict resolution, along with his commitment to human rights, are responsible for his deep involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the decades that followed. Even today he continues to apply the lessons and insights acquired during a more than fifty-year career to the challenges facing society.

Professor McKersie is currently an Emeritus Professor of Management at MIT.  He received his doctorate from Harvard and has taught at the University of Chicago, Cornell, and MIT.  He also served as Dean of the ILR School at Cornell and Deputy Dean of the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

September 1, 2020