Conceptualizing Employee Participation in Organizations

Abstract

The concept of employee participation is common to many different discipline areas in the social sciences. The form participation takes varies considerably depending on the discipline. On the one hand, it can relate to trade union representation through joint consultative committees and collective bargaining, to worker cooperatives or to legislation designed to provide channels for employee representatives to engage in some form of joint decision making with employers. On the other hand, it can encompass myriad mechanisms that employers introduce in order to provide information to their staff or to offer them the chance to engage in joint problem-solving groups or use their skills at work via job-enrichment programmes. This article examines the dynamics of participation, illustrating how different forms have come to prominence at different periods in recent history. It looks at how these specific practices might interact with one another.

Employee voice: charting new terrain

“…Because research and analysis have grown around the voice concept in a variety of disciplines, 'employee voice' has become an elastic term meaning different things to different policy, academic and practitioner actors (Poole, 1986;Sashkin, 1976;Strauss, 2006;Wilkinson et al, 2010;. In the many disciplines that cover voice, such as human resource management, political science, economics, organizational behaviour (OB), psychology or law, perspectives toward the concept differ.…”

Mary Parker Follett, managerial responsibility, and the future of capitalism

“…We start by noting that ''employee participation'' and ''voice'' are both very broad terms, with little consistency of meaning (Wilkinson & Dundon, 2010). Indeed, there are myriad definitions and forms of participation; using the same terminology, scholars from different fields define and use the concept quite differently (Wilkinson, Gollan, Marchington, & Lewin, 2010). Further, there is considerable controversy within the scholarly literature.…”

Re-engagement with the employee participation debate: beyond the case of contested and captured terrain

“…In the literature terms such as participation, engagement, involvement or empowerment are sometimes used interchangeably, whereas the meanings and forms that the term 'employee participation' can take vary considerably across disciplines (Wilkinson et al, 2010). As Heller et al (1998: 15, emphases in original) note in their pioneering work on the Tavistock Institute:…”