Employee Involvement and Participation

Employee involvement is often identified as a key contributor to high performance work systems. Explain why employee involvement is so important. Use theory and examples to support your answer.

Companies nowadays need to turn to various methods in shaping their competitive strategy in order to stay competitive and achieve bottom line. The focus on best allocation of human, technological and material resources is critical to organisational performance. Theorists often consider people factor as the key resource ensuring success of an organisation. In fact, people constitute and create organisations, being their foundations and accelerators of change. Hence, attention to wise management of human capital is essential in order to trigger off its entire potential. High performance work systems (hereinafter referred to as HPWS) are an example of such agile management system, which by many is considered to be medium of achieving competitive edge and wining both customers and employees (Owusu 1999). HPWS is a collection of HRM practices that has revolutionised workplaces. HPWS is “a set of work innovations that include autonomous work teams, socio-technical systems, open systems planning, new plant designs, and other similar innovations” (Farias & Varma 1998, p.50). Considerable number of recent studies has supported the idea that HPWS improve organisational performance and that employee involvement (EI) is its critical constituent. This essay discusses employee involvement and its forms within the frames of HPWS, as one of its main practices. Further, it demonstrates the attributes and importance of EI, basing on the theory and relevant examples. Finally, the essay emphasises EI as being a seminal constituent of high performance work systems; however, it implies that it is not the sole element ensuring better corporate performance and a holistic view should be adopted in the management’s approach.

Approaches towards human capital have been evolving over decades and

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