It is estimated that more than 20 million employees currently hold stock in their companies through a variety of benefit options, including employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), broadly granted stock options, or 401(k) plans with heavy concentrations of employer stock.
Study after study proves that broad-based ownership, when done right, leads to higher productivity, lower workforce turnover, better recruits, and bigger profits. ‘Done right’ is the key.
This paper surveys key issues and themes surrounding ESO schemes in Australia.
The Southwest Airlines Way examines how the company uses high-performance relationships to create enormous competitive advantage in motivation, teamwork, and coordination among employees.
On September 30, the seven employees of Select Machine, in Brimfield, Ohio, began to purchase their company from the two retiring owners, Doug Beavers and Bill Sagaser, using an employee-owned cooperative.
An increasing number of engineering firms are adopting ESOPs because of their many benefits. “We’re seeing a resurgence in them,” says Matheson, managing director of Matheson Financial Advisors in Falls Church, Va. “There’s a growing trend.”
Using a leveraged ESOP to buy out a departing or retiring business owner is a strategy with considerable benefits for all involved.
This paper analyses data on 490 companies with broad-based stock option plans, matched to data from Compustat in order to compare their characteristics and performance to that of other public companies.
The survival rate of worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms in market economics appears to equal or surpass that of conventional firms. But they typically return a different combination of economic benefits to their member-owners than do conventional firms…
We examine labor productivity in small, medium, and large firms that broadly distribute stock options under starkly different market conditions – during the bull (1995-1997) and bear (2000-2002) stock markets. We find greater labor output in both upward and downward markets in all firm size categories, with the exception of small firms in a declining market, where the productivity is also greater, but the statistical significance of the result is weak.
This paper examines the productivity effect of the adoption of executive and broad-based stock options. The findings include a positive impact on productivity after the introduction of both executive and broad-based stock options.
In this paper, we use empirical analysis to analyze company characteristics associated with the adoption and maintenance of broad-based stock option plans. Overall, our results provide support to the claim that higher monitoring costs prompt firms to adopt and maintain employee stock option plans.
Over 25 years, The Davey Tree Expert Company’s employee owners built a good small company into one of the premier companies in its industry, with an entrepreneurial zest for new products and acquisitions. The company’s development would have pleased its inventive founder and provably surprised the family members who sold it to hesitant employees in 1979.
Is it true that small businesses are just big businesses that haven’t succeeded yet? John Abrams’ company pursues conscious growth not maximum growth.
Can a support organization enhance the development and performance of an employee-owned sector in a market economy? That is the question this paper will address.
By law, shareholders have an exclusive right to make certain corporate decisions, and this arrangement is generally justified by the shareholder’s role as the owner of the firm. However, many thoughtful observers hold that such a privileged position for shareholders is morally objectionable, in part because it neglects the important role played by employees.
The case examines how Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation Holdings (SRC), a key player in the engine and parts remanufacturing market in the US, turned itself around by implementing the ‘Open Book Management’ (OBM) philosophy.
Carole Pateman argues that democratic participation in the workplace can increase workers’ feelings of political efficacy and political participation. We explore this issue by looking at the implementation of a high involvement work system (HIWS), using both cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons.
Research on employee ownership has focused on questions of productivity, profitability, and employee attitudes and behavior, while there has been little attention to the most basic measure of performance: survival of the company. This study uses data on all U.S. public companies as of 1988, following them through 2001 to examine how employee ownership is related to survival.
The Baby Boom is de-booming and soon there will be many more jobs than people available to fill them. The message: Keep your workers happy today.
UAL suffered from particular design flaws in its stock ownership plan and, more seriously, the absence of complementary institutions focused on the distinctive problems of employee-owned firms.
The strategy outlined by the authors hinges largely on opening up the books to all employees and keeping the staff posted on financial matters.
There is a significant gap in the incidence and development of employee ownership between the European Union (EU) and the US when both sectors are examined.
Details a thinly disguised situation faced by a recent Harvard MBA graduate who was forced by a prospective employer to place a dollar value on a grant of stock options.
This paper presents finding from our most recent research on the transformation of participatory employment practices of Japanese firms in the 1990s, during which the Japanese economy slowed down considerably. The operation appears to be of particular public policy interest for many countries considering participatory employment practices as a way to improve their productivity performance and thus competitiveness.