Ohio’s Employee-Owned Network: Helping Employee-Owned Companies to Help Themselves?
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.
Does Employee Ownership Enhance Firm Survival?
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.
Labor Markets and Firm Benefit Policies in Japan and the United States
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.
Jet Rubber: Ten Years of ESOP Success
The fifty employee owners of Jet Rubber Company, a manufacturer of custom molded goods and rubber-to-metal parts founded in 1955, celebrated the 10th anniversary of their ESOP in March 2003.
Are We Out of Options?
They were the currency of the American dream. Now they are worthless paper — a symbol of CEO greed. What went wrong with stock options? Where do companies go from here? Our only option: Visit one of the world’s leading authorities on employee ownership.
Motivating Employee-Owners in ESOP Firms: Human Resource Policies and Company Performance
The growth of ESOPs over the past 25 years is part of a general growth in compensation arrangements linking worker pay to company performance, including profit sharing, gain-sharing, and broad-based stock options in addition to the various methods of employee ownership.
United is a Poor Model for Employee Ownership
It would be easy to look at what’s happening at United Airlines, now on the brink of bankruptcy, and conclude that the concept of employee ownership in America has fallen into a tailspin.
Research Evidence on Prevalence and Effects of Employee Ownership
The idea of employee ownership has attracted support across the political spectrum, often being seen as a form of economic democracy that complements our political democracy. Along with these positive views, however, there have been many concerns expressed about employee ownership particularly that it can expose workers to excessive risk and may in some cases increase labor management conflict and lower economic performance.
Broad-Based Employee Stock Options – A Union-Nonunion Comparison
Until recently, stock options were primarily reserved for senior executives and selected managers in most American corporations. In the last decade or so, however, stock options have become part of the compensation package for an increasing number of rank-and-file employees.
Shared Modes of Compensation and Firm Performance: UK Evidence
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.
Stock Ownership and Work Motivation
Topics include: ownership and motivation, different ways to become an owner, and does ownership make a difference?
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Promoting Employee Ownership at the Subnational Level
There are at least six reasons why we should be concerned with encouraging employee ownership at thesubnational level: at the level of the state, the province, the region, the municipality, or other subnationalgovernmental units or at the level of the industrial branch, cutting across governmental geographic units.
Employee Governance
This paper reviews the conflicts of interests introduced by employee participation in the governance of a firm and how these can be constructively resolved by introducing a division of power between investors and employees and/or between management and workers.
Microsoft’s Vega Project: Developing People and Products
This case describes Microsoft’s human resource philosophies and policies and illustrates how they work in practice to provide the company with a major source of competitive advantage. Discusses employee development, motivation, and retention efforts in one of Microsoft’s product groups.
Silicon Graphics, Inc.
An equity research analyst is trying to decide how to analyze Silicon Graphics’ financial performance.
Employee Ownership: An Unstable Form or a Stabilizing Force?
In this paper, we take on a seemingly very simple set of empirical questions that we hope will shed light on whether employee ownership of firms ‘works’…
Stock Price and Operating Performance of ESOP firms: A Time-Series Analysis
Prior literature suggests that the impact of employee ownership on employee behavior may depend on the financial rewards associated with ownership. As the financial value of ownership accounts increases, employee attitudes become more positive, which, in turn, improves organizational performance. In this paper, we explore this financial perspective of employee ownership by examining the relationship between stock price and operating performance of ESOP firms.
United Airlines
In 1994 United Airlines became the largest employee majority-owned enterprise in the United States, with various groups of employees – most represented by unions – having purchased 55% of its stock in exchange for various concessions. The employees accepted pay cuts and made other concessions, but were also granted representation on the company’s board of directors…[newline]
Employee Ownership, Employee Attitudes, and Firm Performance: A Review of the Evidence
Employee ownership in U.S. companies has grown substantially in the past 20 years. This paper reviews and provides some meta-analyses on the accumulated evidence concerning the prevalence, causes, and effects of employee ownership, covering 25 studies of employee attitudes and behaviors, and 27 studies of productivity and profitability (with both cross-sectional and pre/post comparisons).
Participation and Productivity: a Comparison of Worker Cooperatives and Conventional Firms in the Plywood Industry
A perennial issue is the study of organizational behavior is the impact on productivity of participation by workers in a firm’s decisionmaking. The question has returned to the foreground is the recent debate over policies to increase U.S. productivity growth.
Employee participation, ownership, and productivity: A theoretical framework
A new conceptual framework to define and differentiate among diverse forms of employee ownership is developed.
The Great Game of Business: the Only Sensible Way to Run a Company
This book that has, since 1992, become the primer for open-book management, a new method based on the concept of democracy, the spirit of sports, and the reality of numbers.
The Effects of Employee Ownership on Employee Attitudes – An Integrated Causal Model and Path-Analysis
Research on employee-owned organizations to date has utilized alternative theoretical perspectives and has examined varying attitudinal outcomes. This study reviews previous research and attempts to integrate the findings into a causal model that combines the results of prior studies. The resulting causal model was tested empirically with a sample (N = 181) of employees from a firm that adopted an employee ownership programme.
The Elusive ESOP–Productivity Link: Evidence from US Firm-Level Data
This paper investigates whether employee participation in ownership or profit-sharing in publicly held firms through an ESOP or profit-sharing plan was positively associated with productivity measures. The sample consists of firms that adopted such plans during 1982 through 1987.
The Economic Effects of Profit Sharing in Great Britain
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.