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The Institute of Management (IM) supported by Blessing White, has undertaken major new research into the effects of employee involvement on attitudes and performance. The findings are presented in full in an IM research report and are summarised below.
The objective of the research project was to investigate the attitudes and experiences of managers concerning programmes of involvement and participative decision making in their organisations. In particular the project sought to examine desired versus actual extent of employee involvement; views about its value and benefits and the relationship with managerial empowerment.
The report enables the reader to benchmark employee involvement in his or her own organisation and provides practical recommendations for effective implementation.
Research for the project was conducted in January 1995 when the views of over 1,100 managers were obtained from a postal questionnaire sent to a random sample of 5,000 individual members.
It is clear that in the right circumstances increased employee involvement can be of value to organisations. Benefits can include: increased job satisfaction for employees and increased commitment to the organisation; greater success in managing change, more effective use of tacit knowledge; lower turnover and absenteeism and in some cases, significantly improved productivity. However, research and practice have shown these benefits to elude many organisations: key questions then concern the preconditions, first for effectively increasing employee involvement and, secondly, for reaping organisational benefits from doing so. Writers on management have frequently laid the blame on middle management resistance to the involvement and empowerment of their subordinates: interestingly the results of this research challenge...