The way the McElhanney Group is organized has helped foster a positive, profitable culture. Forty per cent of the key staff, around 320 staff members, own 100 per cent of the shares. Mr. Newcomb says this drives the success of the company collectively.
Protegra is a small company established in 1998 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The company specializes in the area of computer software development and business performance consulting. Protegra features a unique organizational design, characterized by a lack of hierarchy and a collegial, professional culture centred on employee and customer values. Various information systems support Protegra’s design. In the process of expanding into foreign markets and enlarging staff, Protegra has been concerned with preserving its way.
Frieda Takaki took a deep breath, filling her senses. She was about to make a very difficult decision. She took off her shoes, placed them next to her desk and started pacing her office barefoot as she was thinking aloud. “I can’t let this business close down,” she whispered. “I have to do something about it.” The answer was now abundantly clear: why wouldn’t the employees buy the business from the owners?
Maui Divers established its employee ownership plan in 1997. Maui Divers store managers/employee owners embrace the business as their own. Although the final decision belongs to the company management team, store managers excel in increasing sales and they continuously come up with business plans in order to make the business better.
This research looks at how employee-owned businesses performed before and during the 2007-2009 recession. This report assesses the financial performance of employee-owned businesses compared with conventionally structured companies where employees do not have a significant stake in ownership or the right to participate in decision-making.
Bertelsmann’s EVP HR Immanuel Hermreck and his team were focused on four key HR issues. Three of these were somewhat discreet: improving Bertelsmann’s employer brand; managing Bertelsmann talent across the firm’s decentralized businesses; and ensuring early identification and appropriate development of Bertelsmann’s top 100 high potential managers (hi-pos) to better seed the company’s future top management. The fourth issue-recruitment and retention-played an integral role across all three challenges and had to be strengthened and made consistent across the firm, not an easy prospect given Bertelsmann’s highly decentralized structure.
The great potential of employee ownership to improve business performance lies in its capacity to bring people together to work as a team toward shared success.
It’s all well and good that a shared ownership stake may promote a team orientation, but does teamwork necessarily translate into superior business results?
What is workplace democracy? Workplace democracy is generally understood as the application of democratic practices, such as voting, debate and participatory decision-making systems, to the workplace.
The FED was established to promote the concept of broad-based, participative employee ownership and entrepreneurism and actively funds inter-disciplinary research and development of business school and engineering curricula.
This Teaching module shows four areas in the entrepreneurship curriculum where teaching about employee ownership can 1) put a needed spotlight on this widespread and useful practice and 2) add conceptual value and rich examples for the course topics being taught…
We examine how employee ownership is used to solve the agency problem between institutional investment management firms and employees.
Based on ten case studies, the report explains what motivated a highly diverse mix of businesses to consider employee ownership as a succession or start up route.
We examine whether options granted to non-executive employees affect the performance of the firm by exploring the link between broad-based option plans, option portfolio implied incentives, and firm operating performance.
The Toronto-based advertising and communications agency recently implemented an employee share ownership plan (ESOP), that has allotted 49 per cent of the company’s shares to potential and existing staff members.
This paper reviews the main strands of research on employee share ownership over the last forty years.
‘Making employee ownership work’ is a new guide from the Employee Ownership Association and co-ownership advisers the Baxi Partnership, based on a survey of 25 EOA member companies including John Lewis, Unipart, Arup and Mott MacDonald.
First, the authors developed a scale for psychological ownership with four components — self-efficacy, accountability, sense of belongingness, and self-identity. Second, they correlated it with transformational leadership, organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, workplace deviance, intentions to stay, and job satisfaction. All the correlations were in the predicted direction. The authors concluded that integrating psychological ownership … Read More
The report, on which EOA advised, concludes that employee ownership of the kind pioneered by Central Surrey Health has a valuable role to play but needs support from policy makers.
I have had dozens of conversations with business owners who want to share equity with some or all employees over the past several years.
This is a collection of cases about the following companies: John Lewis Partnership, IsBank, Banca Popolare Milano, Handelsbanken, Dexia, Total, Aerlingus, Kardemir, Tullis Russell, Saf Tehnika, Eircom, and Enel.
This intensive summer course is an opportunity for participants to be exposed first-hand to a unique organizational model of participatory leadership, management, ownership and decision making by attending lecture and visiting sites at the Mondragon Corporacion Cooperative (MCC) in Mondragon, Spain.
Written by internationally acclaimed business writer Charlie Leadbeater, Innovation Included makes the case for more public services to be provided by co-owned companies.
The John Lewis Partnership (JLP) is one of the UK’s most profitable retailers – sales grew by 6.3% and pre-tax profit by 18.7% in the year to 27 January 2008. Its success owes much to the co-ownership principles of its founder, John Spedan Lewis, who handed over control and ownership in two trust settlements in the last century.
In March, 2007, Michael Foley, Chief Executive Officer of Reflexite Corporation, had to decide whether to proceed with a change in the company’s employee stock ownership plan. Foley, still in his first year as CEO, pondered the situation: the employees had spoken, but when the man who had built the company strongly objected, shouldn’t one listen?