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Human resources play a vital role in the success of any organization. No organization can survive and sustain in the long run without the continuous and unwavering support of their employees.Organizations should focus and work upon their policies to maintain cordial relations with their employees for sustainable growth (Guest, 1987; Marchington, 1992; Becker, Billings, Eveleth & Gilbert, 1996; Huselid, 2017; Dutton & Ragins, 2017). Employee relations term was first used in the western world in the 21st century to replace the term “Industrial relations”. Employee relations can be classified into four types of relationships, i.e., contractual, emotional, physical, and practical relationship between the employer and employee (Blau, 2017). Initially, Employee relations used to be maintained by the department of human resource management (Strohmeier, 2013; Tsui, Pearce & Porter, 1997), they was solely responsible for managing and enriching the overall HR ecosystem. Nowadays, workplaces are continuously changing owing to their continually evolving organizational culture and focusing more on maintaining cordial relationship with the employees.
In the present era, the rising urge of the organizations to prosper and grow in the short run amidst the cut-throat competition is giving way to various unethical and immoral practices as well (Allen, Porter & Angle, 2015; Young, Davis & McNeil, 2015; Myerson & Bichard, 2016; Kennedy & Anderson, 2017; Gee, 2018; Skinner, 2018). Consequently, short term planning, hasty decision-making, lack of creative and innovative ideas may propel a feeling of doubt and suspicion towards the management amongst the employees in the organizations, proving detrimental to corporate interest (Slawinski & Bansal, 2015; Harper, 2015). This poor attitude of management can give rise to dissatisfaction, disrespect, and lack of trust amongst the employees (Dean, Brandes & Dharwadkar, 1998; Arino, Torre & Ring, 2001; Schein, 2003). Above all, the profit-centric mentality and corporate interest can make the situation more worse. It is mandatory to maintain and strengthen the bond between employees and employers by carving out a valued relationship based upon trust and commitment (Hasim & Tan, 2015; Ganesan & Hess, 1997; Wilkinson, 1999). Employee relations rely upon the psychological contract between the employees and their organizations, rather than the written job contract (Obushenkova, Plester & Haworth, 2018). Organizations need to make employees feel valued at their workplace to ensure healthy employee relations and better organizational performance (Rousseau, 1995; Zhao, Wayne, Glibkowski & Bravo, 2007), failing to do so can lead to a loss of corporate credibility and spoiling the mutual relationship of trust between employee and management (Kazoleas & Teven, 2009; Worthington & NussBaum, 2015).