EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS SYSTEM

Employment Relations System

Employment Relations System

Employee Involvement and Participation

Glew and colleagues' (1995) other criteria for EIP schemes are that they involve more than one person - participation is not an individual endeavour - in a manner that is visible to others. Further, EIP schemes are often seen as 'extra-role' or 'role-expanding' for those involved. But the crucial defining characteristic is the presence of a voice opportunity for participants, where voice refers to 'any vehicle through which an individual has increased impact on some element of the organization … without voice, there can be no enactment of participation. This final distinguishing feature allows us to concentrate in this chapter only on those schemes that provide employees with a credible and active input into decision-making. Accordingly, we do not discuss information sharing devices such as newsletters, team briefings and attitude surveys, though these devices may indirectly provide bottom-up employee voice.

We also intend to isolate the EIP component from broader programmers such as 'high performance work systems as the content of such systems extends far beyond EIP. That said, in our review we reflect on Ledford's and Lawler argument (2000) that isolating EIP in this manner can lead to a decontextualised and non-systemic analysis, and that this narrow focus may explain the modest impact of many EIP programmers (Roehling, Cavanaugh, and Moynihan, 2000. 305).

In sum, our working definition of EIP is:

Employer-sanctioned schemes that extend to employee collectivities a 'voice' in organizational decision-making in a manner that allows employees to exercise significant influence over the processes and outcomes of decision making.

This definition incorporates both 'substantive' and 'consultative' forms of participation, where the former equates to shared decision-making on the job, while the latter resembles a consultation exercise.

Such schemes can be categorized along a variety of dimensions including:

Purpose: why the scheme was initiated, to serve what and whose ends?

Level: at what level of the organizational hierarchy does the scheme operate: team, workplace, divisional, strategic;

Scope of the agenda: which subjects, and which decisions, are dealt with by the scheme (three categories: 'local' [i.e. workplace and task concerns], 'medium' [i.e. workplace policies] and 'distant' [i.e. organizational strategy matters]; Connor (2001) identified nine different decision agendas;

Direct or indirect: whether the scheme involves individual employees themselves [direct], or representatives of employees [indirect]

Depth: the extent of employees' influence over the final decision, ranging from 'hardly any' through serving in an 'advisory' capacity to 'joint decision-making' up to full 'employee control'; alternative categories are 'suggestion involvement', 'job involvement' and 'high-involvement' in employers' strategy and policy; 'setting goals', 'decision-making', 'solving problems' and 'designing and implementing change (Kaufman, 2005. 23).

EIP AND HRM

The necessity for some form of EIP appears in most HRM models, such as Pfeffer's (2002) set of seven universal 'best practices' used in better performing firms. Many authors draw upon human capital theory arguing that harnessing employees' skills and knowledge can add economic value to the firm. EIP schemes enhance decision-making by tapping employees' direct knowledge of possible solutions to organizational problems and their initiative, what Deming (1999) ...