UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF PARTICIPATION - VIEWS FROM THE WORKPLACE

It is now generally agreed that there has been a growth in the extensiveness of employee involvement (EI) in Britain in recent years. However, the value of this information is limited because many of the studies rely heavily on management viewpoints about the impact of EI. Even when surveys of employee opinion are undertaken, however, the results are typically abstracted from the organizational context in which they are located. In this article, we present information from six organizations collected as part of a larger study on EI in Britain. This illustrates that employee attitudes to EI are dependent, inter alia, upon the prior experiences which employees have of EI and work in general, management's approaches to employee relations, and the recent and projected corporate performance of the organization. This leads us to suggest that EI is as much affected by the prevailing organizational culture and environment as it is a source of change. The authors call for more research studies of this kind to be undertaken.