Employee Involvement/

Employee Empowerment

 Faced with competitive demands for lower

costs, higher performance and greater
flexibility, organizations are increasingly
turning to employee involvement to enhance
the participation, commitment and productivity
of their members.
Employee involvement is a broad term that
has been variously referred to as or related to
empowerment, participative management,
engagement, work design, high involvement,
Industrial Democracy and quality of Work Life.
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Employee Involvement
It seeks to increase members inputs into
decisions
that
effect
organization
performance and employee well being.
It can be described in terms of four key
elements which can promote worker
involvement.

a) Power: it includes providing people with

enough authority to make work related
decisions covering various issues such as
work
methods,
task
assignments,
performance,
customer
service
and
employee selection. The amount of power
given may vary a lot.
b) Information: Timely access to relevant
information is vital for making effective
decisions. Organizations can promote EI by
ensuring that the necessary information
flows freely to those with decision authority.
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c) Knowledge and skills: EI contributes to

organizational effectiveness only to the
extent that employees have the requisite
skills and knowledge to make good
decisions. Organizations can facilitate EI
by providing Training and development
programmes.
d) Rewards: Because people generally do
those things for which they are recognized,
rewards can have a powerful effect on
getting people involved in the organization.
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These four elements contribute to the

employee
Involvement
programme
success by determining how much
employee participation in decision making
is possible in the organizations. If all four
are made available throughout the
organization, and especially at the lower
levels, EI would be attained.
Further, because the four elements are
interdependent, they must be changed
together to get positive results.
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How Employee Involvement

affects productivity
EI practices can improve productivity in
three ways:
a)Such
interventions
can
improve
communication and coordination among
employees
and
organizational
departments and help integrate them.
b)EI interventions can improve employee
motivation, particularly when they satisfy
important employee needs.
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c) They improve the capabilities of the

employees, thus enabling them to perform
better.
It can be said that these practices
increase employee well being and
satisfaction by providing a better work
environment and a more fulfilling job.
Improved productivity can also increase
satisfaction particularly when it leads to
greater rewards.
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Employee Involvement
Applications
The three major ones are:
a)Parallel Structures
Involves members in resolving ill-defined
complex problems. Also known as
Collateral structures, dualistic structures
or shadow Structures, these operate in
conjunction with the formal organization.

 They provide members with an alternative

setting in which to adress problems and to
propose innovative solutions free from the
existing formal organization structure.
These structures facilitate problem solving
and change by providing time and
resources to members to think, talk and
act in new ways.
Two most common Parallel structures are
cooperative Union Managemant projects
and quality circles.
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Application stages
Cooperative Union Management projects and
quality circles interventions fall at the lower end
of the EI scale and are typically implemented in
the following steps:
a) Define the purpose and scope
b) Form a steering Committee
c) Communicate with organization members
d) Create forums for employee problem solving
e) Address the problems and issues(Action
research process)
f) Implement and evaluate the changes
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b) Total Quality management

It grew out of an emphasis on quality control and
represents a long term effort to orient all of the
organizations activities around the concept of
quality.
Quality is achieved when organizational processes
reliably produce products and services that meet or
exceed customer expectations.
TQM increases workers knowledge and skills
through extensive training ,provides relevant
information to employees, pushes decision making
power downwards in the organization and ties
rewards to performance.
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Application Stages
a) Gain long term senior management
commitment
b) Train members in Quality
methods(principles and tools of quality
improvement)
c) Start quality improvement projects
d) Measure progress(benchmarks)
e) Rewarding Accomplishment
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c) High Involvement
Organizations

In modern times the focus is on using high

involvement work practices to create high
involvement
organizations.
These
interventions create organizational conditions
that support high levels of employee
participation.
Unlike parallel structures that do not alter the
formal organization or TQM interventions that
tend to focus on particular processes, HIOs
address almost all organization features.
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Features:
Most of such organizations include several
if not all of the following features:
Flat lean organization structures
Innovative Job Designs
Open Information systems
Well defined career systems
Proactive selection
Proper training
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Appropriate reward systems

Participative and encouraging personnel policies
Proper and pleasant physical layouts and
working conditions.
All these features of a HIO send a message to
people in the organization that they are
important, respected, valued, capable of growing
and trusted and that their understanding of and
involvement in the total organization is desirable
and expected.
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