Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management

John E. Baur, Anthony R. Wheeler, M. Ronald Buckley, Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben, John E. Baur, Anthony R. Wheeler, M. Ronald Buckley, Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben, M. Ronald Buckley, Anthony R. Wheeler, John E. Baur, Jonathon R. B. Halbesleben

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789738520
• eBook ISBN: 9781789738537
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Volume 37 of Research in Personnel and Human Resources Management contains six original scholarly monographs written by thought leaders in the field of human resources management. This volume focuses on human resources branding, innovation and creativity in human resources management, high involvement work systems, work home boundary permeability, the emerging concept of grit in human resources management, and data visualization issues in human resources management.

CHAPTER 1

HIGH-INVOLVEMENT WORK PROCESSES AND SYSTEMS: A REVIEW OF THEORY, DISTRIBUTION, OUTCOMES, AND TENSIONS

Peter Boxall, Meng-Long Huo, Keith Macky and Jonathan Winterton

ABSTRACT

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

Keywords: High-involvement work processes; high-involvement work systems; worker participation; high-performance work systems; employee autonomy; job quality; employee well-being

High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are concerned with the way in which people carry out their work in organizations. They are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures (e.g., Felstead & Gallie, 2004; Lawler, 1986). In such approaches, employees participate more fully in decision-making than is observed when work practices are heavily controlled by technologies, by bureaucratic rules or by managerial supervision. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by improved investments in human capital, such as better two-way communication, greater training and higher pay – we can talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). Fostering a high-involvement model of working is widely regarded as an important pathway to better workplace performance and employee well-being although these claims need careful assessment against the available evidence.

The goal of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive review of the literature on HIWPs/HIWSs. We begin by defining our terminology and then outline the evolution of this philosophy of working, both in terms of its industrial history and the intellectual traditions or theories that have argued a case for it. We then review the research on the contingencies that help to explain the distribution of HIWPs/HIWSs. Many theorists can marshal an argument in favor of higher employee involvement in decision-making but a key question we still face is this: if there is so much to gain, why is there not a greater uptake of such work systems? This leads into a section that reviews the evidence on the outcomes of HIWPs/HIWSs for firms and workers. In this section, we also review issues in research methods. We then present a section that summarizes and discusses key tensions associated with high-involvement working before we reach our final conclusions, including our claim that this model is one of the most important ways in which we can improve the quality of work and well-being in our societies.

HIWPs AND HIWSs: TERMINOLOGY

In defining what we mean, let us begin by locating HIWPs within the wider literature on human resource management (HRM) and employment relations. It helps to contrast HIWPs with another commonplace term: that of “high-performance work systems” (HPWSs), a notion that originated in the United States, gaining prominence in the debate over the post-war decline of US manufacturing competitiveness. Cappelli and Neumark (2001) trace the term’s popularity to an influential public report, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages! (Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, 1990). The term was given significant impetus by Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, and Kalleberg (2000), whose book, Manufacturing Advantage: Why High-Performance Work Systems Pay Off, generated major interest in how reforms in work organization could revive the fortunes of US manufacturing.

While the initial focus was on the way that production work is organized in manufacturing, the topic of HPWSs became part of a larger agenda concerned with human performance right across manufacturing and services, including in the public sector (e.g., Knies & Leisink, 2018; Leggat, Bartram, & Stanton, 2011). The term garnered wide appeal in the policy and practitioner communities and is deployed well beyond the United States. It is used in an analysis of workplace learning across countries and industries conducted for the International Labour Organization (Ashton & Sung, 2002). It is used in major studies of management practice in the European Union (EU) where there are concerns, similar to those in the United States, about how to simultaneously enhance business competitiveness and improve employee outcomes (e.g., Eurofound, 2013; Pot & Koningsveld, 2009). Similarly, it is popular in China, where the HPWS research stream involves large numbers of firms and focuses on both employee and organizational outcomes (e.g., Chang & Chen, 2011; Gong, Chang, & Cheung, 2010; Zhang & Morris, 2014).

However, definitional issues have dogged the notion of HPWSs from the outset (Boxall & Macky, 2009). As early as the mid-1990s, Becker and Gerhart (1996) illustrated the diversity of conceptions of the relevant HR practices involved in a table of five leading HPWS studies in the United States. These studies listed as many as 11 and as few as four practices, with no one practice common to all five and with some disagreement as to whether particular practices, such as performance-related pay, had positive or negative effects. What might be meant by the term only becomes more complex when we move from any one national context and recognize the significant variations in how HR practices are designed, understood, and implemented in different societies, regions, and cultures (e.g., Paauwe & Boselie, 2003, 2007). Reviews and studies of HPWSs have regularly observed that “little consensus exists among researchers regarding the specific practices to be included in the configuration of high-performance human resource practices” (Sun, Aryee, & Law, 2007, p. 558).

It is time to admit that this is neither surprising nor a problem over which we should be losing sleep. Two points ought to be clear. First, in every context, organizations need some suitable blend of HR practices to achieve any kind of performance (Boxall & Steeneveld, 1999). In order to survive and grow, every organization needs some kind of “human resourcing” process (Watson, 2005). It needs to bring people on board and manage them in some appropriate way in order to generate performances. This process is initiated by the founding entrepreneur(s), whose actions ignite it. Second, what will be highly performing in each context is inevitably going to depend on a range of contingencies. As Kaufman and Miller (2011, p. 553) conclude from their empirical analysis of US firms: firms’ choices of HR practices are “systematically linked to a variety of economic, technological, organizational, and management characteristics.” Similarly, Stavrou, Brewster, and Charalambous (2010) identified 21 distinct bundles of HRM practices in the European private sector, with 10 of these related to business performance, while Chow, Huang, and Liu’s (2008) study of 241 businesses in Guangzhou identified four distinct HR configurations predicting performance and employee turnover. In reality, with all the diversity and complexity of the organizational world, there can be no final determination of a set of highly performing HR practices – and it is time to stop lamenting the fact. We can, however, help managers to identify the principles that will assist them to develop a view of what will be highly performing in their particular context (Boxall & Purcell, 2016). The important task that should energize us as researchers is identifying which models of HRM emerge in which contexts, why they do so (i.e., which actors and contingencies help to shape them?), describing how they work (the “black box” problem), testing how they affect the outcomes of the parties and, finally, making arguments for how they might do so more effectively (Boxall, Purcell, & Wright, 2007).

With this mission in mind, our goal is to focus on one model of working that may lead to better outcomes: the high-involvement model, which connotes a philosophy or a theme in management action that fosters greater employee participation in workplace decision-making. High-involvement working can be defined as “an ongoing experience of high levels of influence over the decisions that affect the work process, identified through worker perceptions of their jobs and their working environment” (Boxall & Winterton, 2018, p. 30). The high-involvement pathway signifies a redistribution of decision-making about work practices inside organizations. Our main concern is with non-managerial workers who are employed in a production process of some kind, either making a product or serving a customer. For example, the high-involvement pathway could be applied to the decision-making powers of an operator in a manufacturing process, a retail assistant in a supermarket or an academic in a lecture room.

To be fair, a significant number of HPWS researchers have used the HPWS term to signify a high-involvement route to better performance. Most notably, Appelbaum et al. (2000, pp. 7, 39–40) envisage more empowering work design as the starting point for developing a high-performance system. They investigated its manifestation across three different kinds of manufacturing, including modular manufacturing in apparel where they measured a move away from management control of individualized tasks to teams of machinists working in a semi-autonomous way (Appelbaum et al., 2000, pp. 74–75). However, others simply adopted the approach of copying a preexisting list of practices in order to establish authority for a study, which is one well-worn path for getting through the review process at academic journals. For example, many have drawn on Huselid’s (1995) list of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1. High-involvement Work Processes and Systems: A Review of Theory, Distribution, Outcomes, and Tensions
• Chapter 2. The Roles of Grit in Human Resources Theory and Research
• Chapter 3. Data Visualizations and Human Resource Management: The State of Science and Practice
• Chapter 4. Organizational Influences on Work–Home Boundary Permeability: A Multidimensional Perspective
• Chapter 5. Third party Employment Branding: What are its Signaling Dimensions, Mechanisms, and Sources?
• Chapter 6. Reviewing Creativity and Innovation Research Through the Strategic HRM Lens
• About the Authors