Employee Involvement in Practice

Based on Chapter 23 of Human Resource Management in a Business Context (2nd Edition) by Alan Price - published by Thomson Learning

Pages 651-655 of Human Resource Management in a Business Context include a full discussion on this topic. (Very) short excerpts are given here

Marchington (2001) sees employee involvement as a feature of soft rather than hard HRM. In firms with a hard orientation, Marchington considers that the 'numbers-driven', cost-cutting mentality reduces involvement to a one-way communication channel aimed at transmitting management decisions and propaganda to staff. This contrasts with organizations that are true believers in employees as their 'greatest asset' where there is a strategic commitment to sharing information and opinions and achieving a workplace culture that meets business needs. Peccei and Rosenthal (2001) examined attempts to engender desirable customer-oriented behaviours among employees in the context of a major change initiative in a retail company. The change programme followed (by now) orthodox management theory which assumed that management behaviour, job design and values-based training would produce a feeling of empowerment among employees, and that this sense of empowerment would lead to prosocial customer-oriented behaviour. A large-scale employee survey showed that staff who took a positive view of management behaviour and who had also participated in values-based training were more likely to feel empowered. In turn, Peccei and Rosenthal found a positive relationship between psychological empowerment and customer-oriented behaviour.

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