Workplace Democracy More Talk Than Action
Despite widespread recognition that democracy in the workplace can help boost productivity, only one-quarter of the nation’s largest firms have actively promoted greater worker involvement in company operations, according to a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office and a team of USC researchers.
The survey of senior managers at 479 of 1,000 large U.S. companies showed that while 70% of the companies had taken some action in the area of worker participation, most of the efforts were tentative at best. “The level of participation was a mile wide and a foot deep,” said Gerald Ledford Jr., a USC researcher and co-author of the study. “Companies could do much more.”
In addition to examining participation techniques such as quality circles, work teams and the so-called mini-enterprise concept, the study also reviewed information-sharing practices, employee training and incentive pay schemes. In all these areas, the authors concluded, corporate America is falling down on the job: “Most organizations are not doing a good job seeing that their employees understand the business they are part of, get information about how it is performing, have the power to influence its results and get rewarded on the basis of how well it operates.”
About 25% of the companies surveyed said that more than half of their employees were involved in some kind of worker-participation scheme. But Ledford said that in many cases, these were merely token problem solving groups.
Want to Be Seen in Favorable Light
Jerome Rosow, president of the Work in America Institute in Scarsdale, N.Y., confirmed that the participation rate is misleading. “Companies tend to claim more than they do,” said Rosow. “I don’t know of any single company that has more than 50% of their workers involved in participation programs.”
“It’s interesting that companies would want to over-report this way,” Rosow continued. “They want to be on the right side of the argument. Admitting you don’t have worker participation is like saying you beat your wife.”
Ledford said the shallow nature of the participation programs is particularly striking given that more than two-thirds of the respondents said worker involvement had a positive impact on productivity, while virtually none reported negative effects.
The study said that over the past three years, only 5% of firms had given most employees training in areas such as group decision making and problem solving.
Rosow said such training was a key element in making worker participation a success. On the issue of incentive compensation for employees, the researchers found that most companies favored merit pay, while few employed so-called gain-sharing plans, which link pay to work-unit performance.
The survey was designed by three USC researchers affiliated with the Center for Effective Organizations at the USC School of Business Administration and conducted in 1987 by the General Accounting Office. The GAO was seeking to draw on the experience of the private sector in considering worker involvement strategies for federal government agencies.
