Employee Involvement: A Case Study

How have organisations embraced employee involvement practices to motivate staff?

Before I discuss how organisations have embraced employee involvement, what is employee involvement? According to James Harter, employee involvement is referred ‘to the individual’s involvement and satisfaction with as well as enthusiasm for work’ (Harter, Schmidt and Hayes, 2002). Employees have the opportunities to take part in decisions that affect their working environment; this can be in their ‘immediate job’ or ‘wider company issues’. Involvement can be direct or indirect; direct involvement is interaction between employers and their employees; indirect is employee representatives such as forums or trade unions in decision making (Durán and Corral, 2016).

Commitment and involvement are closely aligned, although it needs to be a ‘two-way’ relationship, thus meaning in order for an employee to be committed, they need to have ‘positive’ attitudes about their job. In order to achieve positive attitudes, involvement in their working environment is key (Armstrong and Taylor, 2017). Motivation in employee involvement is ‘intrinsic’ according to Armstrong. Employees need to feel the work they do is meaningful to be continually motivated. Organisational citizenship includes the behaviors of employees and those employees who are willing to go the extra mile and work longer hours or help other colleagues. All three overlapping components can be the center of employee involvement.

Benefits of Employee Involvement

If organisations have high level of employee involvement then this could result into these following factors, according to Martin Stairs and Martin Galpin (Stairs and Galpin, 2018);

 Lower absence and higher employee retention

 Increased effort and productivity

 Better quality of work, less error

Giving employees a ‘voice’ demonstrates that the management values their opinions and their contributions. If employees feel ‘able’ to communicate their thoughts and feelings, ‘they will demonstrate higher levels of performance’ according to Armstrong (Armstrong and Taylor, 2017), because they will feel more involved in their working environment. This overall benefits everyone in the organisation because employees become more motivated and the management team can reflect the employees opinions, contributions and feelings and put changes in place (within reason); their opinions/contributions could also be beneficial to the organisations success, so therefore having such a practice in place could give organisations a competitive