Comparing perspectives on high involvement management and organizational performance across the British economy

Abstract

We identify three perspectives on the link between high involvement management and organizational performance. In particular, we distinguish between high involvement management as a set of complementary best practices, as a set of synergistic practices, and as an underlying orientation or philosophy. We show that no study has investigated all perspectives simultaneously, and those that have tested one or two of them have produced mixed results. Consequently, we design and report a study aimed at testing the three viewpoints, which uses data from a large representative sample of workplaces across the British economy. The results show that, individually, practices tend to be unrelated to performance and do not have significant synergistic relationships. A high involvement orientation as measured by a latent variable that is centred on flexible working is related to the level and rate of change in labour productivity. Yet its association with the level of productivity is in combination with a TQM orientation; for productivity change, it is in combination with variable pay. Moreover, it is discrete from work enrichment practices, which are more strongly associated with labour productivity. Variable pay and the TQM orientation are more strongly related to productivity change than is the high involvement orientation, which is also not associated with labour turnover, but, unexpectedly, it is positively associated with absenteeism.

Keywords:

• absenteeism
• high involvement management
• human resource management
• labour turnover
• latent variable analysis
• organizational performance
• productivity
• total quality management
• work enrichment

Acknowledgements

The UK's Economic and Social Research Council funded this research (grant number R000238112). The empirical research is based on data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (WERS98), a survey that is jointly sponsored by the Department of Trade and Industry of the United Kingdom, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Policy Studies Institute. The National Centre for Social Research was commissioned to conduct the survey fieldwork on behalf of the sponsors. WERS98 is deposited at the Data Archive at the University of Essex, UK. Neither the sponsors nor the Data Archive has any responsibility for the analysis or interpretation of the material contained in this article.