This paper summarizes new evidence from the “Shared Capitalism” Project on the extent to which workers’ earnings depend on the performance of their firm or work group in the US and advanced European countries and on the impact of sharing arrangements on economic behavior.
Oxera was commissioned by HM Revenue & Customs (formerly the Inland Revenue) to examine the impact of tax-advantaged share schemes on UK company performance (whereby companies reward their employees by granting them shares, or share options, as part of their remuneration package).
Successful enterprises are ones in which employees are active “co-creators” of value, rather than passive followers. But there are no MBA-taught wheezes which can boost an individual’s interest in the overall success of an organisation.
Evident in the case are important themes such as the transformational leadership of its senior management, the effective use of human resource strategies to control organisational growth, and the adoption of values similar to Charles Handy’s ‘Citizen Corporation’.
This paper examines the use and consequences of shared compensation plans (profit sharing, profit related pay, SAYE schemes and company stock option plans) in a sample of UK workplaces and firms in the 1990s.
Though only five years old, employee-owned St. Luke’s Communications has become one of the most talked about advertising agencies in the United Kingdom, increasing its profits eightfold.
This paper explores the impact of employee ownership on employee attitudes, using additional data obtained from four UK bus companies which had adopted the ESOP form of employee share ownership. After reviewing the recent UK literature, the paper highlights findings from US literature that a ‘sense of ownership’ is an important intervening variable between actual ownership and additudinal change, and that opportunities for participation in decision-making are more important that ownership per se in generating feelings of ownership.
St. Lukes, a rebellious young agency spun out of the once-revolutionary Chiat/Day, practices what it preaches — the gospel of total ethics and common ownership.
There are a number of ways to have workers’ remuneration linked more readily with firms’ commercial performance. One is to link wages to profits by using cash-based profit sharing (where workers are made cash payments which vary with employer’s profitability). A second is to have workers paid partly in their firms’ own shares. A third, and more extreme alternative, is producer co-operatives where workers participate in profits, ownership and decision-making. In this article we examine both the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of such schemes.