BA HONS IN BUSINESS STUDIES

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BA (HONS) IN BUSINESS STUDIES
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT BMG346J1 Lecture Six
Employee Involvement and Participation Norman
Crawford Room 1K11
School of Business Organisation and Management
Email NG.Crawford_at_ulster.ac.uk
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LEARNING OUTCOMES

• By the end of this session you will,
• understand the background to changing forms of
  employee involvement and participation
• have examined the relationship of employee
  involvement and empowerment
• be able to articulate the differences between
  various forms of involvement and participation,
  in particular, their methods and strategic
  influence

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EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT

• 1. Profit sharing
• 2. Whitely Councils (1917)
• 3. Joint Production and Advisory Committees
  (during World War II)
• 4. Bullock Committee of Enquiry (1977)
• 5 Individualist Employee Involvement

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DEFINING EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT AND PARTICIPATION

• Participation refers to state initiatives which
  promote the collective rights of employees to be
  represented in organisational decision making or
  to the efforts of employees themselves to
  establish collective representation in corporate
  decisions this definition would include
  collective bargaining over terms and conditions
  of employment.
• Involvement refers to practices and policies
  which emanate from management and sympathizers of
  free market commercial activity and which purport
  to provide employees with the opportunity to
  influence and where appropriate take part in the
  decision making on matters which affect them.
• (Hyman and Mason, 1995)

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Some Types, Levels and Degrees of Employee
Involvement
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Four Categories of EI Schemes (Marchington et al,
1992)

• Downward communications (top down) eg. from
  managers to other employees
• Upwards, problem-solving forms, designed to tap
  into employees knowledge and opinion at
  individual and group level
• Financial participation, schemes attempting to
  link rewards of individuals to performance of
  unit or enterprise as a whole
• Representative participation, employees involved
  through representatives drawn from among their
  number sometimes on basis of union membership

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MOST WIDELY USED EI SCHEMES

• Downward communications
• company magazine or newspaper
• team briefings
• Upward problem solving schemes
• attitude surveys
• quality circles
• teamworking
• Financial participation
• profit-sharing schemes
• save-as-you-earn schemes

• Representative participation
• joint consultative committees
• - non-union model
• - marginal model
• - complementary model
• Note also, European Works Council Directive
• - aimed at multi-national companies, employing
  1,000 or more workers with at least 150 employees
  in 2 or more EU states

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DEFINING EMPOWERMENT

• a change management tool which helps
  organisations create an environment where every
  individual can use his or her abilities and
  energies to satisfy the customer.
• (Cook Macaulay, 1977)
• Unlike industrial democracy there is no notion
  of workers having a right to a say it is
  employers who decide whether and how to empower
  employees. While there is a wide range of
  programmes and initiatives which are titled
  empowerment and they vary as to the extent of
  power which employees actually exercise, most are
  purposefully designed not to give workers a very
  significant role in decision making but rather to
  secure an enhanced employee contribution to the
  organisation. Empowerment takes place within the
  context of a strict management agenda. (W
  ilkinson, 1998)

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Benefits of Empowerment for Organisations
(Holden, 2001)

• Greater awareness of business needs among
  employees
• Cost reduction from delayering and employee ideas
• Improved quality, profitability and productivity
  measures
• Enhanced loyalty and commitment
• Decrease in staff turnover
• More effective communication

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Benefits of Empowerment for Employees

• Increase in job satisfaction
• Increase in day-to-day control over tasks
• Ownership of work
• Increase in self-confidence
• Creation of teamwork
• Acquisition of new knowledge and skills

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Criticisms of Empowerment

• Practical reasons for failure, including lack of
  training and inadequate communication
• Failure to recognise that empowerment usually
  means wholesale culture change
• Ideological criticism that empowerment is
  exploitation
• Empowerment may undermine trade union influence

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REFERENCES

• Cook, S. Macauley, S. (1997) Empowered
  customer service, Empowerment in Organisations,
  Vol.5, No1, pp54-60.
• Holden, L. (2001) Employee involvement and
  empowerment, in Beardwell, I. Holden, L. (eds)
  Human Resource Management A Contemporary
  Perspective, FT/Prentice Hall.
• Hyman, J. Mason, B. (1995) Managing Employee
  Involvement and Participation, Sage.
• Marchington et al (1992) New Developments in
  Employee Involvement, Employment Department
  Research Series No 2, Manchester Manchester
  School of Management.
• Wilkinson, A. (1998) Empowerment theory and
  practice, Personnel Review, Vol27, No1, pp40-56.