Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Introduction
The drive for economic performance and competitiveness is a never-ending
process upon which the very sustainability of the organization depends. This
global business environment can be very volatile and requires businesses to be
adaptive, flexible and responsive in their strategies to achieve economic
performance and competitiveness. If organisations are to respond to these
challenges, it is more than just the manipulation of capital and technology that will
be required to be successful in this business environment. The rate of change is
also a significant challenge to the behavior of organizations that seek to be
competitive in the global environment. Business survival dictates critical attention
to the competitive realities of profits, competition and people resources be given.
Many organisations have chosen the Employee Involvement (EI) approach to
improving their organizational performance in response to these challenges. These
organisations have adopted a variety of strategies that range from quality circles,
customer specifications, participatory decision making, teamwork, collaboration,
re-engineering, consultative committees, total quality management, quality of
work life, plus many more. These responses are used either singularly or in
combination. The key prerequisite to these strategies is the willingness of
managers and their people to change the ways in which their work has
traditionally been undertaken.
A common theme throughout these responses from businesses is that of EI. This
is, the belief that employee involvement practices (EIP) contribute to business
success in this challenging business environment. This response has led to an
increased and continuing interest in the forms of inclusive and collaborative
people practices and processes utilized by organisations. While EI programs have
been available for long periods of time, their contribution to improved
organizational performance has not been clearly understood or recognized.
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Yet, at the same time, EIP continue to be popular. Management theory through the
1950s and 1960s was based around Tayloristic management concepts and applied
to a mass production context where employees performed a defined manual task,
often requiring little skill. People were considered as interchangeable parts within
the production process. Turnover and absenteeism were reportedly high and this
was attributed to the high specificity of the job design and employee control.
Motivation of employees to perform productively was reported to be low and this
was compensated for by close monitoring, supervision and control to ensure
output was maintained. Buffers of utility workers were used to compensate for the
adverse production impacts of absenteeism. This literature review will look at
some of the definitions of EI and overview some of the theory that underpins EI. It
will also review common EI models and seek to discuss these models from the
perspective of the willingness of the employee to engage in an EI program. From
this discussion, issues will be derived that relate to the factors that influence the
decision of an employee to commit to an EI program.
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organizational culture. The involvement-commitment cycle is presented as a
general theory to explain why work organizations introduce EI schemes.
Management theorists put forward three reasons why management introduces EI:
moral, economic and behavioural. Consultation and indirect employee
participation acknowledges the potential benefit of employee voice in the
decision-making process. Two major impediments to EI:
Employee rights
The equality of employee relations is a function of organizational values and
culture; in addition, it is buttressed by individual rights that are designed to protect
employees against inequitable managerial behaviour. Sexual harassment as an
employee relations issue – different forms of hostility and misogyny towards
female employees, particularly sexual harassment, has received attention from the
courts and researchers.
Discipline at work
When EI ‘voice’ mechanisms fail to create desirable workplace behaviours,
managers can resort to disciplinary action. We define discipline as the process
maintaining compliance with the rules that regulate employment in order to
produce a controlled and effective performance. Discipline serves to improve,
punish and deter. Every formal organization has rules of behaviour in the
workplace. For example, behaviours considered acts of “gross misconduct.” The
employer can impose penalties for infractions, such as: rebuke, warnings, transfer
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or demotion, suspension and dismissal. Formal disciplinary procedures are the
norm even in workplaces with relatively few employees. Four key features of a
disciplinary are examined:
1. Fairness
2. Facilities for representation
3. Procedural steps
4. Management rules
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• Attraction and retention of employees
• Reduced tardiness, turnover and absenteeism
• Greater staffing flexibility
• Increased service and product quality
• Higher productivity and output
• Reduced staff support and supervision requirements
• More effective resolution of conflict and reduced number of grievances
• Better decisions
• Expansion of staff skills
• Improved morale and job satisfaction
• Less resistance to change
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the outcomes of the quality circles, whereas EI would link the outcomes of quality
circles to organizational success and can, therefore, be considered more strategic.
Dale and Cooper’s (1992) view that EI does not have one set form, but can take a
variety of forms attempting to satisfy any one of the four principles of
humanization at work, namely; security, equity, individuation and democracy.
Indeed EIP can also be seen in this perspective as attempting to meet one or more
of the above humanization principles.Shadur, Kienzle and Rodwell (1999)
recognize the variety of EI; however, they distil the work of Eccles (1993) into
three types of involvement, namely:
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(a) Suggestion involvement - employees contribute ideas;
(b) Job involvement - better ways of organizing and undertaking tasks; and
(c) High involvement - developing better decision making pathways.
Workers in the past were not expected or encouraged to think about the job but to
follow rules, methods and procedures set by management. Performance was
measured and controlled by management. In contrast, flexible production concepts
have recently been developed which put the worker in a more central or
influencing position. Problems are identified and, where possible, are resolved at
the workplace by the workers. A range of knowledge varying from problem
solving and communication skills through to process understanding is needed to
achieve this. However, these multiple skills and conceptual knowledge in this
flexible organizational approach are of little value if workers are not motivated to
contribute beyond the physical effort. This added application of mental or
intellectual effort is labeled as discretionary effort.
For the full expected benefits of EI to be gained, both parties need to commit to
the EI approach. In considering an EI definition, for the purpose of this study, the
Robbins approach with the addition of aspects of Edwards and Wrights’ (2001)
view of discretionary effort captures the main elements referred to above, and the
following definition, adapted from Robbins (1998), will be adopted:
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what is required to just undertake the prescribed workplace tasks which will result
in EI program success. It also recognizes that EI programs have a ‘mutuality’
about them that is; both the employee and the organization must perceive a gain
from the EI programs. In any EI program, the interface between the employee and
the EIP is vital. How the employee sees that interface and then chooses to commit
to participate in the EIP, and the degree to which the employee is willing to
commit effort once participating in an EI program, is crucial to the success of EIP.
Many factors will influence the way employees see EI programs not the least of
which is the congruence between the EIP, the organizational climate and the
business context. EI enables attitudinal reactions in employees to influence
organizational performance and suggest EI increases the following attitudes:
(a) Satisfaction;
(b) Motivation;
(c) Communication within and across functions;
(d) Willingness to engage in problem solving; and
(e) Enhanced acceptance of new work practices.
If EI is viewed as a strategy in terms of developing core business competencies, as
opposed to the traditional business, markets and product strategies, then the focus
of the strategy is driven down to the individual.
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approaches has the core belief that employees, through a collaborative and
inclusive approach, have an enhanced contribution to make to the effective
functioning and sustainability of the organization. EIP will cover both the formal
and informal approaches to employee involvement. EI concepts are generally
operationalised as:
(a) Selection and recruiting;
(b) Training program;
(c) Performance appraisal;
(d) Incentive compensation;
(e) Job design;
(f) Grievance procedures;
(g) Information sharing;
(h) Attitude assessment;
(i) Labour-management participation;
(j) Promotion criteria;
(k) Gain share/profit share; and
(l) Decision making process.
In essence, as has been previously outlined, the concepts above have commonality
with those associated with human resource management (HRM) concepts. The key
difference is to what strategic aim they are applied to, and whether the application
of practices is integrated together to achieve that aim. Indeed, there may be no
difference between HRM and EIP, dependent on the organizational context. By
using the term EIP, this covers the gambit of inclusive practices and policies such
as those listed above, but it is by no means an exhaustive list. There is, in all of
these involvement practices, a belief that high performance has, by inference, high
involvement practices. Yet there is limited evidence readily available to support
this as high performance can also be achieved without high involvement practices.
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There is much debate as to whether the above approaches are viewed as either a
unvaried approach (one best practice) or a contingent approach (one of best fit).
The general view in the literature points to the importance of situational and
organizational aspects in EI which would favour the contingent approach. A lack
of longitudinal research inhibits this debate. The widely supported PIRK model
suggests the synergistic nature of inclusive practices will be greater when the EIP
are complementary.
From this point of view individual core concepts of EIP should be treated as a
collective set of mutually reinforcing attributes. Vandenberg, Richardson &
Eastman (1999) have demonstrated that there is a set of practices that are
antecedents to EIP. Practices such as direction setting, training opportunities, work
design, flexibility and incentive practices, further supporting the situational or
contextual framework for EIP.
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practices. The wide variety of EIP can be summarized into five main schemes
namely:
(a) Information sharing / communication processes;
(b) Decision making / problem solving processes;
(c) Business improvement/individual skill development;
(d) Financial rewards and incentives; and
(e) Performance management processes.
The link between EI and performance is considered marginally positive, however,
given the complex nature of work practices, capital investment, technology,
management competency and worker competence, it is difficult to establish,
without challenge, the degree of performance improvement due to EI. Yet at its
base, the outcomes of human resource practices and organisational performance
are the antecedents of financial outcomes by which overall organisational
effectiveness is judged. While no correlation is directly and clearly established
between EI and performance, EI as an approach is directly focussed on the areas
of human resource practices and organisational effectiveness and is, therefore,
considered worthy of being linked. It is on this basis that establishing the form and
nature of EIP utilised in an organisation will provide insights into the extent and
nature of the EI approach, and on what performance goal it is focussed. This
highlights the second of the research issues:
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and job performance (the cognitive approach). These approaches have been
categorised in the literature as:
1. Humanist Approach - aspects associated with attitudes and behaviour,
i.e. motivation.
2. Cognitive Approach - knowing the work processes and having the
knowledge on job performance.
EI programs have also been categorised as either ‘work harder’ (emotional
approach) or work smarter types (cognitive approach). In extending these
approaches Leana and Florkowski (1992) consider four models of employee
involvement, namely:
(a) human relations;
(b) human resources;
(c) workplace democracy; and
(d) instrumental management.
From these models, two views of EI emerge. Firstly, EI as a process of gaining
greater acceptance of organizational objectives and secondly, EI as a counter
balance against management’s power. The EI models above highlight the
dichotomy of EI in practice.
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In addition, the benefits employers gains from EI are generated by those factors
listed below which aggregate to result in an overall improvement to organization
effectiveness:
(a) Highly motivated workforce;
(b) Better relationships between employees and management; and
(c) Acquisition of information that will positively improve costs, efficiency,
effectiveness and quality.
It is from this belief that EI programs are promoted as providing intrinsic benefits
to employees as well as benefits to the organization’s performance that in turn
reflect a benefit to management benefit. However, for EI to be implemented the
employee first must see a benefit that will be a driver, or incentive, to move
through the engagement interface. This leads to considering EI from an employee
perspective.
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eventual integration of EI into normal management policies and practices that any
mismatch of expectations is resolved. Involvement does not just happen, it is
initiated by management action and its existence and continuance must be
supported by management commitment and practices.
Conclusion
The correlation between EI and business performances has been generally
established as marginally positive. However, the mechanism for that correlation is
not largely understood. Indeed the strength of that correlation has varying degrees
of support. These basic elements of EI are supported in the literature. From the
literature, it is contended that the mechanism for the correlation is based on the
employee’s perception of EIP in the context of the organization. This perception
will influence their choice on the degree to which they participate in EIP. This
perception will govern the choice employees make to engage in the EI program
and enter a psychological contract with the organization based on the mutuality of
benefits. In this view, the exact EIP used is immaterial, so long as it is congruent
with managements approach, both espoused and applied, and validates people’s
sense of personal value.
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