Do employee involvement programs improve organizational performance?
Each employee worth money to the business. Companies that treat employees as machines will never realize their full potential. Therefore employee involvement programs (EIPs) are vital to business management and it will helps achieving a good organizational performance, especially in long run. However it also needs to depend on how well the EI program is adopted in the business and how the business makes effort to implement the programs within the organization, in order to reach a successful performance.
Employee involvement programs allow employees to be involved in decision-making process. It increases employee’s interests to the business and helps them to gain greater satisfaction therefore it helps businesses to reduce labour turnover. EIPs include suggestions schemes, attitude surveys, or TQM (total quality management) programs. TQM has been particularly popular during 1980s and 1990s in the United State as it enhances quality and productivity in organization. However TQM has not been truly useful in some of the companies according to various studies: some results appear to be contradictory. This is because there has been a lack of TQM theoretical development and most organizations are having a distorted view of TQM which therefore lead to the lack of construct coherence. The research on TQM has found that it works best in high-volume, production-oriented business environments (Lawler, 1994).
One empirical study shows that EIPs will increase the amount of organization information received by the employees. (Marchington, M., Wilkinson, A., Ackers, P., & Goodman, J, 1994). It identifies factors that affect employees’ attitudes towards EIPs among six organizations in the UK. Employee sees EIPs as a good opportunity to get their feelings and opinions across to the management. But on the other hand managers may use this as a way to get employees to do their jobs for them or viewing it as a catalyst for cultural change. Therefore good suggestions would not be made
Employee involvement programs allow employees to be involved in decision-making process. It increases employee’s interests to the business and helps them to gain greater satisfaction therefore it helps businesses to reduce labour turnover. EIPs include suggestions schemes, attitude surveys, or TQM (total quality management) programs. TQM has been particularly popular during 1980s and 1990s in the United State as it enhances quality and productivity in organization. However TQM has not been truly useful in some of the companies according to various studies: some results appear to be contradictory. This is because there has been a lack of TQM theoretical development and most organizations are having a distorted view of TQM which therefore lead to the lack of construct coherence. The research on TQM has found that it works best in high-volume, production-oriented business environments (Lawler, 1994).
One empirical study shows that EIPs will increase the amount of organization information received by the employees. (Marchington, M., Wilkinson, A., Ackers, P., & Goodman, J, 1994). It identifies factors that affect employees’ attitudes towards EIPs among six organizations in the UK. Employee sees EIPs as a good opportunity to get their feelings and opinions across to the management. But on the other hand managers may use this as a way to get employees to do their jobs for them or viewing it as a catalyst for cultural change. Therefore good suggestions would not be made