Introduction

Involvement in a labour relation, like most things in economic life, can be viewed as a series of encounters (Gui, chapter 2 of this book) between entrepreneur and worker, worker and client, and among workers themselves. The relational environment resulting from these encounters is likely to influence workers' effort and their willingness to collaborate and exchange information useful for better performance. Hence, it can influence both the quantity and the quality of output. At the same time, the patterns and quality of relations affect the creation of relational goods, thus influencing the utility of the actors involved.

The obviousness of these statements notwithstanding, the economic analysis of labour relations largely overlooks the interpersonal side. This is true first of all for those theories that interpret the interaction between worker and firm exclusively in terms of market exchange and consider the wage to be the most powerful device for increasing the intensity of labour supply. The influence exerted by aspects of work activity other than wages, among which are included relational ones, is deemed to be of limited importance and unpredictable, owing to workers' heterogeneity.

The importance of interpersonal aspects in labour relations is underlined even by scholars who stress the importance of motivations to work and of other non-monetary factors. Instead of depicting the connection between wages and labour supply (in terms of hours or effort) as the result of individual utility maximisation, they focus on specific norms regulating group behaviour (Helper, Bendoly and Levine, 1999), on the emergence of trust between worker and firm (Akerlof, 1982) or else on the hypothesis that workers have altruistic feelings towards fellow employees (Rotemberg, 1994b).