Employee Voice and Participation

Contested Past, Troubled Present, Uncertain Future

Jeff Hyman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351699198
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business General

Employee participation and voice (EPV) concern power and influence. Traditionally, EPV has encompassed worker attempts to wrest control from employers through radical societal transformation or to share control through collective regulation by trade unions. This book offers a controversial alternative arguing that, in recent years, participation has shifted direction.

In Employee Voice and Participation, the author contends that participation has moved away from employee attempts to secure autonomy and influence over organisational affairs, to one in which management ideas and initiatives have taken centre stage. This shift has been bolstered in the UK and USA by economic policies that treat regulation as an obstacle to competitive performance. Through an examination of the development of ideas and practice surrounding employee voice and participation, this volume tracks the story from the earliest attempts at securing worker control, through to the rise of trade unions, and today's managerial efforts to contain union influence. It also explores the negative consequences of these changes and, though the outlook is pessimistic, considers possible approaches to address the growing power imbalance between employers and workers.

Employee Voice and Participation will be an excellent supplementary text for advanced students of employment relations and Human Resource Management (HRM). It will also be a valuable read for researchers, policy makers, trade unions and HRM professionals.

Chapter 1

Why does employee participation and voice matter?

Introduction

The previous chapter identified the various – and often conflicting – sources, rationales and effects of EPV. The present chapter focuses on the potential beneficiaries of different EPV formulations. Based on a wealth of reported research, both classical and contemporary, this chapter examines in greater depth:

a links between EPV and democratic values

b associations between discretion and autonomy at work and employee dignity, health, wellbeing and satisfaction

c impact of EPV on economic performance and productivity

From these different perspectives it becomes clear why EPV is today such contested terrain.

We first examine the potential beneficiaries of EPV and through this preliminary analysis enquire if participation advantages more than one party in the employment relationship and, following the seminal work of Ramsay, ask whether a zero-sum situation exists in which only one party benefits from participative exercises, to the detriment of others. The chapter demonstrates difficulties inherent in directly associating participation and effects. First, because participation takes different forms and meanings, it is likely to exert different behavioural effects depending on the intentions and actions of its initiators and the contexts in which they operate. Second, it can be difficult to ascribe specific effects to individual initiatives, as these may have positive, negative or contrasting consequences for employees depending on the context, the prevailing state of employment relationships, in terms of levels of trust and perceived fairness, and the intended outcomes. Third, the definition and operationalisation of concepts such as ‘satisfaction’ add complexities to the analysis and possible prescriptions. But, with these caveats in mind, we attempt to differentiate between different approaches to participation and thereby to analyse links between them and their effects.

Links between EPV and democratic values

Our initial claim of positive and discernible links between EP and democratic values, expressed in the workplace or potentially in broader society, is examined initially here and its public policy foundations explored further in chapter 2. The first proposition is deceptively simple: organisations that encourage participation are considered more democratic, thereby offering stakeholder citizenship or procedural justice to their employees. These attributes in turn offer benefits to employees, in terms of self worth and personal actualisation, as well as to the organisation, in that participating workers can be expected to be more efficient and productive. This deceptive simplicity is exposed when one questions the nature and objectives of the participation exercise and the extent to which power relations between the parties are affected. Pateman (1970) identified the looseness and variability of definition, though in seeking more precision, she stipulates that participation has to be directed specifically toward decision-making; but even here we face difficulties as managers may introduce participative initiatives such as 1980s quality circles to promote ‘organizational efficiency’, implementing ‘techniques used to persuade employees to accept decisions that have already been made by the management’ (ibid.: 68, emphasis in the original). As shown in the introduction, Pateman describes this process as pseudo-participation, while Hyman and Mason (1995: 21) call it employee or direct involvement, namely low-level, individualised and communicative practices and policies that emanate from management and are not intended to impact upon managerial decision-making other than to lubricate its exercise.

In other words, if we think of participation in terms of control over work, initiatives which arise from organisational pursuit of efficiency are likely to be participative in name only for employees, with limited means to influence or redirect management decisions, though they may provide non-participative benefits such as more fulfilling tasks. Ramsay, in fact, went further, arguing that managers’ concern to involve employees in limited exercises in autonomy or profit-sharing is only triggered when their interests are threatened at times of economic growth and potential trade union incursions into managerial decision-making. Once threats to managerial prerogative diminish, the involvement techniques either fall into disuse or are rescinded unilaterally by management (Ramsay 1977). In the contemporary economy, there is considerable evidence that managerial involvement or ‘empowering’ techniques may well accompany or follow organisational restructuring and downsizing to compensate for lower staff numbers (see Beirne (2013) for an excellent summary of tensions inherent in empowering employees in recessionary times). Hodson comments that ‘the underlying rationale for employee involvement programs put forward by management is almost always the “stick” of job loss rather than the “carrot” of greater meaning and dignity in work. Workers are thus asked to participate in the context of heightened job insecurity and reduced corporate commitment to workers’ (Hodson 2001: 173–74). Approaches under the pseudo involvement banner include various communication procedures, such as briefing groups and the use of company social media to inform employees of specific issues and developments, and limited extensions to task autonomy provided by empowerment and teamworking. Nevertheless, some studies (such as van Wanrooy et al. 2013; Hodson 2001) suggest that employees feel they can derive some benefit even from these limited and potentially manipulative exercises in terms of information provision and enhanced task discretion.

Pateman identifies a second approach, namely partial participation, in which authority relations remain essentially undisturbed but in which the subordinate partner has the means to influence decisions but not ‘equal power to decide’ their outcome (Pateman 1970: 70). Hyman and Mason term these processes employee or representative participation and argue, that unlike involvement, they are associated with collective employee attempts to influence management, typically through collective bargaining and works council membership (Hyman and Mason 1995: 22). Again, as demonstrated in subsequent chapters, there is mixed evidence for the impact of partial participation in democratising work as such exercises include diverse practices ranging from worker directors, domestic and European Works Councils (EWCs) and continental styles of social partnership to the more adversarial approach of collective bargaining. These initiatives have been introduced and maintained, sometimes in the face of continuing employer obstruction or opposition, with the intent of benefiting employee interests, but they can also be associated with positive effects for employers, notwithstanding their employee and trade union provenance (Freeman and Medoff 1984).

Reflecting on the studies of Almond and Verba (1965), Pateman suggests that as effective political democracy in the wider society depends on citizen participation, exercises in partial participation which promote practical citizenship in the workplace can contribute to what she terms political efficacy (i.e. a more democratic society) through their educational and confidence-building impacts (Pateman 1970: 49), though evidence for the effects of these practices has been mixed (Burkitt 1981; Martin 1968). The evidence for a democratising effect of participation in offering greater decision-making influence, whether in the workplace or in broader society, is questionable, any impact being dependent on a coalition of factors, including type and depth of participation, organisational context, wider political traditions, and the state and direction of the economy.

Associations between discretion and autonomy at work and dignity, satisfaction, employee health and wellbeing

Dignity

A second claim is that participation at work proffers greater dignity and self-worth to employees. Dignity is linked to having stable employment but also to being able to exert control over one’s work. Ciulla provides an interesting example of the nineteenth-century ‘workingman’s control code’ involving refusal to work whilst being observed by the supervisor as a gesture of defiance and hence maintaining and protecting one’s dignity (Ciulla 2000: 92). Dignity also involves the need to find genuine meaning in what one does: as we can see with emotional labour, considered below, imposed meaning can and does lead to personal loss of dignity. Nevertheless, as an early study by Herzberg et al. (1957) demonstrates, satisfaction at work can be positively derived from behavioural factors such as consideration and fairness, summarised by Blumberg (1968) in his classic study of industrial democracy as comprising decency of supervisory treatment.

Hodson provides a comprehensive exposition and analysis of dignity at work and for our purposes identifies four main challenges to workplace dignity: ‘mismanagement and abuse, overwork, limits on autonomy, and contradictions of employee involvement’ (Hodson 2001: 5). Mismanagement and abuse are found in pressurised and competitive conditions where workers are primarily blamed for shortfalls in meeting objectives. Workers compensate by attempting to find their own informal means to impose control and meaning, whether negatively through disobedience, subversive humour and even acts of sabotage (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999: 38–41) or more positively through bypassing supervisors and importing their own improvised creative problem-solving methods. Overwork or work intensification can be matched – albeit with some difficulty – through oppositional worker solidarity and occasional practical ingenuity (ibid.: 60). Examples of challenges to autonomy can be found below in the section on professions where managers (often themselves without professional qualifications) aim to control highly skilled or specialised work by deconstructing it into a series of measurable and enforceable targets. Finally, the contradictions of EI are based on the premise that employees can be manoeuvred into self-exploitation, along the lines of the pseudo-participation described above, by contributing to productivity through transforming the corporate culture into one of espoused shared values. In one such case, drawing on a study of a financial institution that eerily prefigures the financial crash of 2008, a company targeted employees as the reasons for poor organisational performance and expected them to accept task intensification rather than undertaking a critical examination of the ‘questionable managerial decisions resulting in a history of risky high-stakes loans’ (Hodson 2001: 13). Nevertheless, even within these limitations, on the basis of comprehensive meta-analysis, Hodson is able to conclude that ‘employee involvement, whatever its forms, results in more meaningful, creative, and positive work-life experiences. These differences are large, consistent, and statistically significant’ (ibid.: 181), though as we show later both internal and environmental factors need to be taken into consideration before arriving at this definitive conclusion. Nevertheless, there does appear to be a positive relationship between employee voice, no matter how circumscribed, and dignity at work.

Satisfaction

The study of satisfaction at work and its relations to job quality and performance has a long history. Blumberg (1968: 119) is unequivocal in his view that ‘any survey of the literature reveals that far up on the list of factors making for satisfaction at work is the desire, among all groups, for autonomy, responsibility, control and decision-making power on the job’. Another noted authority on the sociology of work, Robert Blauner (1960: 346), maintained that control ‘over one’s time and physical movement … control over the environment … and control as the freedom from hierarchical authority’ was one of the main contributory factors to satisfaction at work. From these and recent major studies (e.g. Walton 1985; Huselid 1995; Appelbaum et al. 2000), it would be easy to conclude that job control expressed in forms of participation that provide job satisfaction are intimately associated with quality of performance.

Nevertheless, satisfaction is an elusive concept to capture empirically as it can be highly subjective (Brown et al. 2012), difficult to measure (Rose 2003) and may be influenced by personal factors such as age and gender (Anleu and Mack 2014). Satisfaction as an outcome will depend on inputs – and these can vary. For example, if expectations from work are low, then a high reported level of satisfaction might simply reflect that low expectations have been exceeded. Also, some commentators argue that different groups of workers may have different expectations from their work, leading to expressions of satisfaction emerging from ostensibly poor quality working conditions. In their study of female care workers, Hebson et al. (2015) demonstrated that high job satisfaction for women can exist alongside objectively poor material working conditions and low extrinsic reward. Work-life contexts need also to be accommodated in models of job satisfaction, but rarely are. However, echoing Hodson above, there do appear to be positive associations between EPV and indicators of satisfaction (Walton 1985). Another fundamental question is whether there exists an identifiable explicit relationship between job satisfaction and work performance. Frequently, one encounters the proposition that ‘a happy worker is a productive one’ and this proposition has also received some critical research scrutiny. In their study of employee share ownership (ESO), Pendleton et al. (1998) concluded that positive attitudes toward ESO are not necessarily manifested in more positive attitudes to work. Similar doubts about putative associations between satisfaction and performance have also been raised by Guest et al. (1993).

One empirical approach that has been adopted to analyse workplace satisfaction is to apply the same criteria longitudinally to examine whether trends emerge over time. For the UK, annual surveys of social attitudes are undertaken where workers (from senior to junior levels) have been asked how satisfied they are with their main job. In 2015, most report high or reasonable levels of satisfaction, little changed from 2005. There is also the problem of identifying causality: the authors of this survey point out that following the years of recession and austerity, job satisfaction might be reported to be high irrespective of job quality because respondents are relieved to be in employment at all (British Social Attitudes 2015). A more comprehensive range of questions was posed for the UK 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study in which three dimensions of wellbeing were introduced, namely: job-related contentment, job-related enthusiasm and job satisfaction (van Wanrooy et al. 2013: 127). While the categories of using initiative, the work itself and sense of achievement all received more than 70 per cent in terms of high/medium satisfaction, this proportion dropped markedly to 43 per cent for satisfaction with involvement in decision-making (ibid.: 129). Positive factors supporting higher satisfaction include: greater job control, flexible working practices, recent provision of training, job security and supportive management. The extent to which these variables interact with employee voice is not revealed but if overall satisfaction has remained steady, despite relatively low satisfaction with involvement in decision-making, it would appear that other factors have contributed to satisfaction. Other quantitative studies show mixed results for job satisfaction, some indicating increases despite the onset of recession (McManus and Perry 2012), while others show decline in job satisfaction through recession-induced work intensification and reduced task discretion. Interestingly, those reporting higher satisfaction point to the role of employers in raising the quality of work with ‘good’ jobs replacing ‘bad’ ones (van Wanrooy et al. 2013: 134), though more nuanced qualitative studies may be required to determine what is meant by ‘good’ jobs.

Good jobs and the quality of working life

Defining good jobs can be problematic. Academically, definitions tend to vary according to discipline. Economists tend to point narrowly to so-called ‘hygiene’ or extrinsic factors, such as good pay, social insurance and retirement pensions as underlying good work. Psychologists and health specialists recognise on one hand the negative effects of insecurity, lack of control over the temporal or demand parameters of work and their impacts on mental and physical wellbeing and on the other, the positive influence of social relationships at work (HSE 2009). Sociological perspectives broadly examine the status of jobs, the dynamics of deskilling or upskilling, and especially power and control relations (Dahl et al. 2009).

Two interrelated factors are intrinsic to sociological interest in work: alienation and control of the labour process. Interest in the nature of work under capitalist production and its potentially debilitating effects on those responsible for doing the producing extends back to the Marxist concept of alienation, which describes and explains the exploitation and isolation of workers both from the processes of work and, through task specialisation, from the outcomes of their labour. From an economic perspective, these emotional and physical constrictions are associated with dysfunctional labour behaviours (such as high labour turnover and high rates of sickness absence) and consequential failing economic performance (Blauner 1964). Similar considerations underpin Braverman’s labour process analysis of the ‘degradation of work’ (Braverman 1974) that divides, fragments and secures tight managerial and technological control of both skilled and white-collar tasks. These actions also form the basis of Ritzer’s later ‘McDonaldization’ thesis (Ritzer 1996), under which job fragmentation is extended to contemporary service sectors and potentially to higher added-value occupations. All these accounts point to the dehumanising effects of fragmented Taylorised labour on the human psyche and physical wellbeing. Even within capitalist enterprise, though, these injurious effects may be mitigated through participative practices that offer genuine opportunities for greater individual and collective worker autonomy and control (Gallie 2003; Green 2006), but in the contemporary neoliberal political economy, initiatives in this direction are both limited and subject to constant infringement (Martinez Lucio 2010).

While different academic disciplines might analyse workplace deprivations in different ways or advocate alternative remedies for their effects (Dahl et al. 2009: 8), a range of practically and policy-orientated institutions have an interest in promoting worker wellbeing through quality work, in particular trade union organisations and government agencies like the UK Health and Safety Executive charged with safeguarding employee welfare. The TUC (2010) identifies a broad range of factors that can promote worker wellbeing. These include: creativity, control, workplace culture, fair treatment and reward, job security, hours of work and intensity of effort. Employee control, as ever, appears to be the common dominating factor in different models, but how this and its contingent factors can be achieved in the modern competitive and short-term cost-focused workplace will be a matter of serious debate in this book. One well-meaning but simplistic approach is to offer a desirable and often extensive checklist of items without indicating the means or feasibility of implementing these items; in this context, see Green’s (2006) critique of the European Commission’s extensive measures of job quality. A similar critique could be aimed at Taylor’s well-publicised review of contemporary working practice in the UK, which identifies six key indicators of quality work, including pay and conditions as well as task discretion and autonomy, teamworking and collective relations, but falls short of offering the means to convert these indicators into effective policy (Taylor 2017: 13).

Another influential factor concerns the different histories and traditions of participation enjoyed by different countries. Even states that have enjoyed long and successful regulatory participation regimes have latterly come under pressure from the twin threats of austerity and globalisation (Frege and Godard 2010: 543). These issues will be covered in depth when examining the scope and depth of participation in the EU, but it is clear, for example, that demands for job quality and positive responses to these demands are found in Scandinavian countries with high union densities and in established pluralist states like Germany and the Netherlands.

EPV that offers measures of control for employees and contingent expressions of satisfaction clearly has a place in defining a good job. But a key question concerns the extent of control that is being delegated under participative regimes. Numerous studies demonstrate the ubiquity of relatively low-involvement approaches adopted in the UK and USA in particular. Many of these can be included under the umbrella title of high involvement/participation/commitment/performance work systems (for convenience, henceforth HPWS, see chapter 6)...