Application of Lexicographic Engineering in Collective Bargaining: A Case Study of Job Dissatisfaction of Employees in a Garment Factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

In Economics and Business, tradeoff between wage rate and hours of work (or level of employment) is the only way for the employer to successfully manage collective bargaining. Depending on the labor market structure, from the tradeoff model a collective bargaining zone can be derived. Within that zone, the labor will optimize their gain from collective bargaining. The present paper reports a controlled experiment of the application of lexicographic engineering of strategic human resources management to reduce job dissatisfaction without any tradeoff option for the employees. Lexicographic engineering argues that employees may ask for many things to become satisfied with their job, but if only one or two most important needs of employees are fulfilled, their needs for other things will become least important and thus can be ignored. In other words, the weighted scores of all other factors contributing to job dissatisfaction become insignificant. The Lexicographic Engineering considers the difference between what employees want vis-à-vis what they get and then multiply the mean difference of each factor with their corresponding relative weights of importance to get the weighted deviation. The sum of weighted deviation is then divided by the weighted sum of what employees want to get the level of job dissatisfaction measured in percentage.