Tony Dundon

Tony Dundon is an Irish (and British) academic. He is a Professor of Human Resource Management and Employment Relations at the University of Limerick.^[1]

Dundon is known for his works on employment relations, human resource management, organisational performance, employee voice, and trade union organising. His works have been published in leading academic journals such as The International Journal of Human Resource Management and Journal of Industrial Relations.^[2] Additionally, he is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences^[3] and the Royal Society of Arts.^[4]

Dundon earned his B.A. in Politics, Economics, and Social History from the University of York in 1991, followed by an M.A. in Industrial Relations from the University of Keele in 1994, and a Ph.D. in Human Resource Management from the University of Huddersfield in 1999.

Dundon began his academic career in 1994 as a lecturer at Wirral Metropolitan College, a position he held until 1997. During this period, he also held a concurrent appointment as a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University from 1995 to 1997. Between 1996 and 2001, he served as a lecturer at the university of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). From 2001 to 2015, he held several positions at the National University of Ireland, Galway, progressing from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and later Professor. Between 2015 and 2019, he was Professor of Human Resource Management and Employment Relations at the University of Manchester. Since 2019, he has been Professor of Human Resource Management and Employment Relations at the University of Limerick.^[1]

In his early research, Dundon examined how paternalistic “family culture” and weak managerial or HR practices in a small non-union firm hindered unionization and worker voice, arguing that state support was needed to extend collective representation.^[5] He investigated how organizations in England, Scotland, and Ireland interpreted and implemented employee voice, finding it was shaped by managerial efficiency goals, external regulations, and internal choices rather than employees’ rights or formal mechanisms.^[6] He also critically examined the psychological contract literature, arguing that its theoretical foundations were flawed and ideologically biased toward managerial interests, and called for a more critical, discursive approach to studying employment relationships.^[7]

Dundon studied employee silence as a management-structured phenomenon, showing that organizational agendas and institutional systems actively shaped and sustained silence, offering a dialectical framework contrasting prior views that framed silence solely as employee motivation.^[8] He also investigated how employee perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional fairness mediated the effects of high-performance work systems on job satisfaction, commitment, and stress, highlighting both positive and negative well-being outcomes.^[9] Additionally, he developed an interdisciplinary framework integrating OB, IR, and LP perspectives to explain employee voice and silence, emphasizing structural power dynamics and psychological factors through a critical pluralist lens grounded in structured antagonism.^[10] Moreover, he also examined how state and non-state actors shaped gig economy employment regulation through a regulatory space framework, showing that shifting state power ultimately favored corporate interests over workers’ rights and broader social equity.^[11]

• Dundon, T., Wilkinson*, A., Marchington, M., & Ackers, P. (2004). The meanings and purpose of employee voice. The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 15(6), 1149–1170.
• Cullinane, N., & Dundon, T. (2006). The psychological contract: A critical review. International journal of management reviews, 8(2), 113–129.
• Donaghey, J., Cullinane, N., Dundon, T., & Wilkinson, A. (2011). Reconceptualising employee silence: Problems and prognosis. Work, employment and society, 25(1), 51–67.
• Wilkinson, A., Dundon, T., Donaghey, J., & Freeman, R. B. (2014). Employee voice: Charting new terrain. In Handbook of research on employee voice (pp. 3–16). Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Heffernan, M., & Dundon, T. (2016). Cross‐level effects of high‐performance work systems (HPWS) and employee well‐being: the mediating effect of organisational justice. Human Resource Management Journal, 26(2), 211–231.