Employee Participation

Employee participation is the process whereby employees are involved in decision making processes,
rather than simply acting on orders. Employee participation is part of a process of empowerment in the
workplace.
Joint consultation is a process whereby management seeks the views and opinions of employees via
elected representatives, before decisions are taken.
Marchingtons four faces of employee consultation:
The non-union model
The competitive model
The adjunct model
The marginal model
Works Councils is a group of employees representing a workforce in discussions with their employers.
Worker Director is a worker elected to the governing board of a business concern to represent the
interests of the employees in decision making.
Advantage of EP:
Participation may result in better decisions. Workers often have information that higher
management lacks. Furthermore, participation permits a variety of different views to be aired.
People are more likely to implement decisions they have made themselves. They know better
what is expected of them, and helping make a decision commits one to it. Participation may
lower the disutility of effort, by providing intrinsic motivation.
The process of participation may satisfy such non pecuniary needs as creativity, achievement,
and the desire for respect.
Participation may improve communication and cooperation; workers communicate with each
other instead of requiring all communications to flow through management, thus saving
management time.
Participative workers supervise themselves, thus reducing the need for managers and so cutting
overhead labor costs. Participation teaches workers new skills and helps train and identify
leaders.
Participation enhances people's sense of power and dignity, thus reducing the need to show
power through fighting management and restricting production.
Participation increases loyalty and identification with the organization. If participation and
rewards take place in a group setting, the group may pressure individuals to conform to
decisions.
When union and management leaders jointly participate to solve problems on a non adversarial
basis, the improved relationship may spill over to improve union management relations.
Participation frequently results in the setting of goals. Goal setting is often an effective
motivational technique, particularly when workers set their own goals.
Disadvantage of EP:
Workers may be less informed than managers, and the premises upon which they make their
decisions may be different. The rewards motivating workers to share their ideas may be larger
than the value of the ideas themselves.
Once becoming committed to a decision, employees may be reluctant to change it.
Not everyone has strong desires for creativity and achievement, or they satisfy these sufficiently
off the job.
Participation is time consuming, and if decisions are made by groups, reaction to changing
environments may be particularly slow.
Retraining of employees and managers can be expensive.
Once a precedent of participation is established, withdrawal of the right to participate becomes
difficult.
Cohesive, participative groups may unite against management to restrict production and
prevent change.
Sharing information with unions raises their bargaining power, so companies may lose.6
Cooperating with management may lower unions' legitimacy with members, so they may lose as
well.
Goals workers set for themselves may be low.

Objectives of EP:
To raise level of motivation of workers by closer involvement, to provide opportunity for expression
and to provide a sense of importance to workers, to develop ties of understanding leading to better
effort and harmony, to act on a device to counter-balance powers of managers, to act on a panacea
for solving industrial relation problems.