Power, Authority, Managerial Prerogative and Professional Practice

The final video in this series on 7HR01 Strategic Employment Relations addresses Assessment Criterion 1.1 by examining how power and authority function within the employment relationship, and how the three principal theoretical perspectives — unitarism, pluralism and the radical or Marxist approach — produce fundamentally different accounts of managerial prerogative. The video distinguishes between structural power, institutional power and ideological power as distinct mechanisms through which workplace actors seek to influence one another, before turning to authority as a separate but related concept grounded in legitimacy rather than coercion. Managerial prerogative — the claimed right to make unilateral decisions over matters such as business strategy, organisational structure, technology adoption, and hiring and dismissal — is treated as a genuinely contested terrain rather than a settled legal or organisational fact.

Each of the three perspectives is applied directly to the question of where managerial prerogative legitimately ends and employee rights begin. The video uses contemporary labour market developments, including gig economy working arrangements, algorithmic management and workplace surveillance, as concrete sites where these debates are actively playing out. Unitarist, pluralist and radical readings of these developments produce sharply divergent conclusions about consent, control and the proper scope of collective bargaining, and the video holds those divergent conclusions in deliberate tension rather than resolving them into a single preferred answer.

The final section turns to the practical implications for people professionals and line managers. The video examines how a practitioner's underlying perspective — whether unitarist, pluralist or radical-informed — shapes specific activities such as designing high-commitment engagement programmes, conducting collective bargaining, building consultation mechanisms, handling conflict, and advising line managers whose own assumptions about authority may constrain their effectiveness. Conflict handling is addressed across all three perspectives, including the question of whether surface-level procedural resolution is sufficient or whether structural causes require separate attention.