Employee Involvement.

 

What is employee involvement? It is a participative process that uses employees´ input to increase their commitment to the organizational success. The logic is that if we engage workers decisions that affect them and increase their autonomy and control over their work lives, they will become more motivated, more committed to the organization, more productive, and more satisfied with their jobs. Let´s look at two major forms of employee involvement.

 

Participative Management

The distinct characteristic common to all participative management programs is joint decision making power with their immediate superiors. Participative management has, at times, been promoted as a panacea for poor morale and low productivity. But for it to work, the issues in which employees are engaged must be relevant to their interests to they will be motivated, employees must have competence and knowledge to make a useful contribution, and trust and confidence must exist among all parties.What is says, is that it is not sure means for improving employee performance.

 

Representative Participation

Almost every country in western Europe requires companies to practice representative participation, called “the most widely legislated form of employee involvement around the world”. Its goal is to redistribute power within an organization, putting labor on more equal footing with the interests of management and stockholders by letting workers be represented by a small group of employees who actually participate. 

 

The two most common forms are works councils and board representatives. The influence of representative participation on working employees seems to be minimal. Works councils are dominated by management and have little impact on employees or the organization. There is little evidence this trickles down to the operating employees they represent. If one is interested in changing employee attitudes or in improving organizational performance, representative participation would be a poor choice.