A Proposed Model of Legal Remedies to Manage Human Resource Issue: A Case Study of an Open University

Abstract

Universities are investing their precious resources to manage legal issues. When a conflict arises between the management and employees at the workplace they prefer to go to court and not rely on trust the internal mechanism to resolve the issues which leads to wastage of financial resources, misuse of the potential energy of the employee as well as employers and damage organizational work environment. The main purpose of the present study was to explore the existing model of legal issues regarding human resource management and propose a sustainable model to overcome the issues for efficient utilization of resources. The data were collected through primary and secondary sources. First, documents were carefully analyzed and legal files were reviewed. After it, semi-structured interviews were taken of the legal advisors, legal managers and human resource manager of the open distance learning University. Data were analyzed through NVivo software. Presently, universities have various committees and syndicate/executive council is the appellate body against the decisions of the committees. Most employees prefer to go to the courts as a legal remedy to find relief.  Whereas the proposed model which has the following three components 1) Nature of the Issue 2) Procedure to Resolve the Issue and 3) Enforcement of the Decision of the Council.  Courts will take only cases on the question(s) of law.