TY  - JOUR
AU  - Freeman,Richard B.
AU  - Kleiner,Morris M.
AU  - Ostroff,Cheri
TI  - The Anatomy of Employee Involvement and Its Effects on Firms and Workers
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8050
PY  - 2000
Y2  - December 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8050
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8050.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Richard B. Freeman
NBER
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/868-3900
Fax: 617/868-2742
E-Mail: freeman@nber.org

Morris M. Kleiner
University of Minnesota
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
260 Humphrey Center
301 19th Street South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
Tel: 612/625-2089
Fax: 612/625-6351
E-Mail: kleiner@umn.edu
AB  - A great many American firms have organized workplace decision-making in new ways to get employees more involved in their jobs -- using policies like self-directed work teams, total equality management, quality circles, profit-sharing, and diverse other programs. This paper uses a firm-based data set and employee-based information to illuminate several aspects about the locus and economic impacts of employee involvement (EI).  Having information from employees as well as from firms allows us to ask not only what EI does for firms, the principal question in the literature on the subject, but also what EI does for workers; and to examine EI from the  bottom up' perspective of participants rather than managers. We find that EI practices are linked in an hierarchical structure that provides a natural scaling of EI activities and the intensity of the EI effort.  Firms that have EI are also more likely to have profit-sharing and other forms of shared compensation.  However, EI has a weak and poorly specified effect on output per worker, but it  has a strong and positive impact on employee well-being.
ER  -