Documents Suter, Jane 3 results

"Industrial relations scholars have long been interested in notions of employee involvement, participation, voice, and industrial democracy but the terminology is so elastic that the types of practices covered are extremely broad. In this article, following a brief discussion that categorizes employee involvement and participation (EIP) in terms of degree, level, and scope, we focus on the relatively dilute formal and informal practices which operate at workplace level in non-union firms. Although researchers now examine direct—as well as representative—forms of EIP, we argue the focus is still on formal systems. This finding is understandable both from a methodological and a theoretical angle, but it leaves a gap in our awareness of how EIP functions at workplace level, and in particular, the role played by line managers in developing informal communication and consultation in non-union firms. In this article, we examine formal and informal EIP within a large non-union firm in the UK hospitality sector; a context characterized by intense product and labor market pressures and limited union presence. Our principal conclusion is that informality takes centre stage in this organization, driven by managerial and worker preferences for informal EIP in the context of close working relations at the customer interface. Moreover, customer pressures and flexible working patterns make it difficult to sustain formal EIP in the context of a capability framework that puts a primacy on managers using informal approaches. However, it is argued that informal EIP needs to be combined with the formal system to operate effectively."

"It is widely accepted that employee involvement and participation (EIP) is a key component of the high commitment bundle of HRM, but that it can take a range of forms in practice. Much of the analysis to date has either treated different forms of EIP as a single construct or has measured EIP by virtue of its presence or absence alone. Drawing on earlier work based on the data from WERS1998 examining the link between various forms of EIP and employee outcomes such as job satisfaction and organisational commitment, the authors re-apply and extend these ideas to data from WERS2004. In particular they develop the concept of institutional embeddedness, in order argue that both the depth and breadth of EIP have important associations with commitment though not with satisfaction.This association held for workplaces employing 25 or more workers, and here it was apparent that the more that employees are involved at workplace level - through a wider number of EIP practices that are held more frequently and include opportunities for workers to have their say - the more likely it is that investments in EIP will reap the reward of organisational commitment. For smaller establishments, given that they tend to operate with relatively few formal schemes, it is likely that managers in these workplaces find alternative ways in which to engage the workforce, and that informal EIP offer similar levels of embeddedness in these situations. A clear implication to be drawn from the findings is that, in a context of lower levels of formality within organisations (large and small), line managers are more than ever the key link between HR policy and the embodiment of actual practice at the workplace. "