Employee participation, work reorganization, and job design

Monthly Labor Review, Dec, 1995 by Polly A. Phipps

Rosemary Batt and Eileen Appelbaum investigate work restructuring programs across different industries, occupations, and work settings in the British Journal of Industrial Relations (September 1995). The authors' major interest is on whether different forms of employee participation affect employee attitudes, commitment, and perception of work performance. They focus on two types of employee participation: off-the-job or "off-line" problem-solving groups with management and "on-line" participation in which employees themselves make decisions on tasks or quality control on-the-job.

While most of the research on high performance work practices concentrates on firm outcomes, Batt and Appelbaum review the sparse literature on outcomes for employees. The results are mixed. They cite some studies finding on-line employee participation has a positive effect on work attitudes, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction, and others that report weak or even negative, links. On balance, the authors suggest that work reorganization in the form of on-line teams has a positive impact on attitudes, commitment, and satisfaction, dependent upon the characteristics of the redesigned jobs of team members or team membership. Few studies are cited on the effects of off-line team membership, and Batt and Appelbaum speculate that it may increase commitment, but have less effect on job satisfaction.

The authors survey employees on their own attitudes, organizational commitment, perceptions of workgroup quality, job characteristics, workload, stress, and on their company's human-resource policies for employment relations, training, earnings, advancement opportunity, and employment security. They analyze the effect of team membership and job characteristics on job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and perception of work-group quality and find that the effect of off-line participation in teams is never significant. On-line participation, however, is always significant and positive.

There are differences by occupation. Craftworkers, while carrying heavier workloads, benefit the most from self-managed teams, as well as improved work group and management-labor relations. Customer-service representatives report improved inter-work-group relations and cooperation, and benefit from increased autonomy, but with no increase in overall job satisfaction. Apparel workers report mixed benefits, with jobs enhanced, but no net gain in job satisfaction due to the increased stress of working in modules. In addition to employees benefiting from self-managed teams, the authors indicate firms appear to benefit from employees' better performance under on-line work group participation programs.