The purpose of this paper is to explore employee participation in ownership and control in a modern corporation and its impacts on intra-organizational social capital and workplace dynamics.
Purpose A growing number of econometric examinations show that works councils substantially shape the personnel policy of firms in Germany. Firms with works councils make greater use of various human resource management (HRM) practices. This gives rise to the question of whether employers view the shaping of personnel policy positively or negatively. Against this background, … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at the effect of profit sharing (PS) on the ability of the firm to take care of the environment. Design/methodology/approach In a large cross-section of French firms, the authors find strong associations between PS and various innovations with environmental benefits. With cross-sectional data from the Community … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the historical background for broad-based ownership in the USA, the development of forms of employee ownership and profit sharing in the USA, the research literature on employee ownership and profit sharing and related employee participation, the development of policy and options for new policies. Design/methodology/approach It … Read More
Stakeholder capitalism seeks to benefit multiple stakeholders, rather than primarily shareholders. Two increasingly popular forms are the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and the benefit corporation. But what happens when a company combines these structures? While the benefit corporation’s expanded stakeholder mandate may appear to come at the expense of employee-owner wealth and the potential … Read More
Do firms with employee ownership (EO) programs exhibit greater employment stability in the face of economic downturns? In particular, are firms with EO programs less likely to lay off workers during negative shocks? In this article, we examine the relationship between EO programs and employment stability in the United States using longitudinal Form 5500‐CompuStat matched … Read More
Values represent guidelines for behavior and are important determinants of organizational performance. In addition, employee-owned enterprises (EOEs) tend to outperform traditional organizations. Thus, identifying the core values that underlie successful EOEs should provide insights for improved firm performance. Based on an exploratory comparative analysis of eight high-performing, employee-owned companies, a common set of values that … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the additive and differential effects of short-term-oriented group incentives (STOGIs) and long-term-oriented group incentives (LTOGIs) on psychological ownership and organizational commitment. Design/methodology/approach This study analyzed data from 17,255 US employees in the 2005 data set of the National Bureau of Economic Research Shared Capitalism Research. Findings … Read More
The aim of this paper is to compute and describe the conditions of an optimal employee ownership contract between an employer and an ambiguity‐averse employee. We then introduce ambiguity aversion in the baseline model of Aubert et al. (2014) using the multiple prior preferences of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) and its extension proposed by Maccheroni … Read More
Work practices and modes of pay have changed in recent decades. The combination of an increasingly educated work force, new information and communication technologies, the influx of AI and big data into business practices from production and sales to human resources, the increased importance of teamwork and the growth of non-standard work arrangements which blur … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss diverse matters concerning the field of Participation and Employee Ownership (PEO) coinciding with the launch of the JPEO. Design/methodology/approach This paper used mixed methods including bibliometric analysis. Findings Significant gaps exist in our knowledge of the scope and nature of PEO. Citation counts illustrate both the changing … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide novel and rigorous evidence on the productivity effect of varying attributes of performance-related pay (PRP) and shows that the details of PRP indeed matter. Design/methodology/approach In doing so, the authors exploit the panel nature of the Finnish Linked Employer–Employee Data on the details of PRP. Findings … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the likely impact of AI robotics technology on the labor market through the lens of comparative advantage. Design/methodology/approach The first section reviews the recent success of AI in outperforming humans in cognitive intense activities such as Go, poker and other strategic games, which portends a shift … Read More
In 2009, United Steelworkers (USW) and Mondragon signed an agreement to promote union co-ops: firms that combine democratic worker ownership and union membership. Eleven U.S. initiatives now seek to implement the USW-Mondragon union co-op model, prompting a debate about whether unions and worker cooperatives are stronger together. This article draws on a case study of … Read More
We use an experiment to evaluate the effects of participatory management on firm performance. Participants are randomly assigned roles as managers or workers in firms that generate output via real effort. To identify the causal effect of participation on effort, workers are exogenously assigned to one of the two treatments: one in which the manager … Read More
I examine how different distributions of ownership and governance rights in firms affect the optimal organization of cross-functional project teams for knowledge-intensive work. I analyze multi-method data from two competing automated manufacturing equipment engineering firms with contrasting formal power structures, one a worker cooperative with ownership and governance rights distributed across occupations and the other … Read More
Union–management relations in the U.S. are best described as adversarial. However, under certain circumstances, they can become cooperative. One example of the latter was the role of trade unions in the conversion of firms to employee ownership. Firm ownership (entrepreneurship, capitalism) by employees has increased in recent years. Specifically, we focus on the use of … Read More
This special section of The Sociological Quarterly, edited by Joyce Rothschild includes the following articles: The Logic of a Co-Operative Economy and Democracy 2.0: Recovering the Possibilities for Autonomy, Creativity, Solidarity and Common Purpose by Joyce Rothschild When Freedom is Not an Endless Meeting: A New Look at Efficiency in Consensus-Based Decision-Making by Darcy K. Leach “Plan … Read More
This article evaluates worker-owned and unionized worker-owned cooperatives as alternatives to the conventional corporate structures for businesses in the United States. With their focus on democratic governance and shared ownership, worker-owned cooperatives offer an antidote to the extreme inequality of income and deterioration of working conditions that workers are experiencing. These are inequities for which … Read More
This article analyses the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation (broad‐based employee ownership, profit sharing and stock options), labour practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover and firm performance in firms that applied to the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For in America’ competition from 2005 to 2007. Although employers with good labour practices … Read More
Decades of feminist scholarship documents the persistence of gender inequality in work organizations. Yet few studies explicitly examine gender inequality in collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives. This article draws on the “theory of gendered organizations” to consider how gender operates in a worker-recovered cooperative in contemporary Argentina. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Hotel … Read More
Two major shifts in contemporary work organizations—“employee participation” and “diversity management”—have typically been studied in isolation from one another. Building on theoretical work by Acker (2006a,b), we ask how the interaction of these two constructs has affected the pursuit of workplace democracy at two worker cooperatives in Northern California. Using qualitative methods, we find that … Read More
Profit-sharing plans are one way to address the global issues of income inequality and uneven wealth distribution while increasing employee engagement. One company, the Chinese telecom Huawei, has a successful employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that demonstrates such incentives can be good for both employees and the business.
William H. (Bill) Carris set a deliberate purposeful course for the whole system change that he deeply desired for his employees. The Carris transformation, innovative in its own right, provides examples of change from being traditionally owned, managed and governed to having shared ownership, participatory management and shared governance by the whole…
The academic literature emphasizes that shared capitalism positively affects employees’ attitudes at work. This paper investigates that issue by testing the relationship between shared capitalism and withdrawal behaviors (turnover and absenteeism). Recent literature interprets shared capitalism as a gift exchange between employers and employees. This paper builds on that literature. The analysis, based on an … Read More