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High-involvement work processes (HIWPs) are associated with high levels of employee influence over the work process, such as high levels of control over how to handle individual job tasks or a high level of involvement at team or workplace level in designing work procedures. When implementations of HIWPs are accompanied by companion investments in human capital – for example, in better information and training, higher pay and stronger employee voice – it is appropriate to talk not only of HIWPs but of “high-involvement work systems” (HIWSs). This chapter reviews the theory and practice of HIWPs and HIWSs. Across a range of academic perspectives and societies, it has regularly been argued that steps to enhance employee involvement in decision-making create better opportunities to perform, better utilization of skill and human potential, and better employee motivation, leading, in turn, to various improvements in organizational and employee outcomes.

However, there are also costs to increased employee involvement and the authors review the important economic and sociopolitical contingencies that help to explain the incidence or distribution of HIWPs and HIWSs. The authors also review the research on the outcomes of higher employee involvement for firms and workers, discuss the quality of the research methods used, and consider the tensions with which the model is associated. This chapter concludes with an outline of the research agenda, envisaging an ongoing role for both quantitative and qualitative studies. Without ignoring the difficulties involved, the authors argue, from the societal perspective, that the high-involvement pathway should be considered one of the most important vectors available to improve the quality of work and employee well-being.

Prior research has demonstrated the positive effects of high involvement work systems on various outcomes but none to date has conducted a comparative test of alternative, plausible models of these systems. This paper aims to address this issue.

A test of five high involvement work system models was conducted. The models were tested using employee perceptions of the presence and effectiveness of the organizational practices included in these systems, whereas a majority of prior studies have measured high involvement work practices based on managers' perceptions only. Measures of eight high involvement work practices (i.e. employment security, selective hiring, extensive training, contingent compensation, teams and decentralized decision making, information sharing, reduced status distinctions, transformational leadership) were used to compare the fit of these five models using confirmatory factor analysis. 317 non‐management employees from five Canadian organizations participated. Participants rated both the extent to which they perceived their organizations to have implemented each of the practices and the perceived effectiveness of these practices. Participants' work attitudes (i.e. affective commitment, continuance commitment, job satisfaction) were used to assess the concurrent validity of the tested models.

For both the perceived presence and effectiveness models, confirmatory factor analyses suggested the superiority of a second‐order model, demonstrating concurrent validity with participants' positive (i.e. affective commitment, job satisfaction) and negative (i.e. continuance commitment) attitudes.

This is the first study to conduct a comparative test of five alternative models of high involvement work systems and one of the few studies to address employee perception of these practices.

The relationship between organization strategy and a high-involvement work system (HIWS) in the accumulation of social capital is investigated in nursing subunits in a large sample of Canadian long-term care organizations. Results suggest that strategic orientation of nursing homes has a differential impact on the ability of these organizations to accumulate social capital in its nursing staff. Using a competing values framework to characterize strategic orientation, long-term care establishments pursuing an employee-focused strategy are able to accumulate higher levels of social capital in their nursing units through the adoption of a high-involvement human resource management (HRM) work system. By contrast, long-term care organizations pursuing an operational efficiency strategy, in tandem with the adoption of a high-involvement HRM system, produce no additional accumulation in nursing unit social capital.

The traditional Confucian management system is considered distinctly different from Western-based management. This study draws data from indigenous Taiwanese firms listed on its public stock market and examines the associations among various human resource (HR) systems and organizational performance. First, factor analysis is used to explore a wide range of HR practices. Then, cluster analysis is used to classify indigenous Taiwanese firms with regard to their HR practices. Indigenous Taiwanese firms were found to use various HR systems, ranging from traditional Confucian HR to high-involvement HR practices. Companies that used high-involvement HR systems were found to perform better than those using a traditional Confucian HR system.

The objective of the research is to assess the degree of adoption of high‐involvement nursing work practices in long‐term care organizations. It seeks to determine the organizational and workplace factors that are associated with the uptake/adoption of ten selected human resource high‐involvement employee work practices.

A survey questionnaire was sent to 300 long‐term care organizations (nursing homes) in western Canada. Results from 125 nursing home establishments (43 percent response rate) are reported herein.

Of the ten high‐involvement nursing work practices examined, employee suggestion and recognition systems are the most widely adopted by homes in the sample, while shared governance and incentive/merit‐base pay are used by a small minority of establishments.

The uptake of high‐involvement nursing work practices is not adopted in a haphazard fashion. Their uptake is variously associated with a number of establishment and workplace factors, including the presence of a supportive and enabling workplace culture.

The objective of this research is to examine the extent and degree of adoption of high involvement work practices in a sample of long‐term care establishments operating in the four provinces of western Canada.

Despite decades of studies on high-involvement human resource management (HRM) systems, questions remain of whether high-involvement HRM systems can increase the commitment of women. This study aims to contribute to the growing body of research on the cross-level effect of HRM systems and practices on employee affective commitment by considering the moderating role of gender.

Integrating social exchange theory with gender role theory, this paper proposes that gender responses to HRM practices can be different. The hypotheses were tested using data from 104 small- and medium-sized retail enterprises and 6,320 employees from Spain.

The findings generally support the study’s hypotheses, with women’s affective commitment responding more strongly and positively to employees’ aggregated perceptions of a shop-level high-involvement HRM system. The findings imply that a high-involvement HRM system can promote the affective commitment of women.

This study investigates the impact of both an overall HRM system and function-specific HRM sub-systems (e.g. training, information, participation and autonomy). By showing that women can be more positively affected by high-involvement HRM systems, this paper suggests that high-involvement HRM systems can be used to encourage the involvement and participation of women.

Employee involvement (EI) is a major part of high-performance work systems (HPWS) that have successfully transformed a large number of organizations and have become standard practice in many new organizations. Despite the proven benefits of EI, however, it is still not as widely utilized as it could be even when accounting for industry and organization differences in its applicability. We suggest that EI implementation is limited in part by the change management challenges it presents. We review the recent research on EI and HPWS, and suggest ways in which change research and theory can inform our understanding of why EI practices have fallen short of their potential and how they can be effectively implemented.

The purpose of this paper is to take a serious look at the relationship between joint consultation systems at the workplace and employee satisfaction, while at the same time accounting for the (possible) interactions with similar union and management-led high commitment strategies.

Using new, rich data on a representative sample of British workers, the authors identify workplace institutions that are positively associated with employee perceptions of work and relations with management, what in combination the authors call a measure of the “good workplace.” In particular, the authors focus on non-union employee representation at the workplace, in the form of joint consultative committees (JCCs), and the potential moderating effects of union representation and high-involvement human resource (HIHR) practices.

The authors’ findings suggest a re-evaluation of the role that JCCs play in the subjective well-being of workers even after controlling for unions and progressive HR policies. There is no evidence in the authors’ estimates of negative interaction effects (i.e. that unions or HIHR negatively influence the functioning of JCCs with respect to employee satisfaction) or substitution (i.e. that unions or HIHR are substitutes for JCCs when it comes to improving self-reported worker well-being). If anything, there is a significant and positive three-way moderating effect when JCCs are interacted with union representation and high-involvement management.

This is the first time – to the authors’ knowledge – that comprehensive measures of subjective employee well-being are being estimated with respect to the presence of a JCC at the workplace, while controlling for workplace institutions (e.g. union representation and human resource policies) that are themselves designed to involve and communicate with workers.

The link between human resource practices and earnings for workers is a notable research lacuna and the purpose of this paper is to address this relationship using a matched data set covering all employees and employers in the Irish private sector.

The analysis is based on the National Employment Survey (NES) (2008). The survey provides measures of individual characteristics such as union membership, collective bargaining coverage, sector, occupation, age, sex and educational attainment. It also provides data on individual employee earnings including overtime and shift allowances, together with weekly hours worked. The particular benefit of the NES is that it is a large-scale matched employer-employee survey.

The results indicate that extensive use of high-involvement practices measured in this study is positively associated with higher earnings for both lower and higher earning employees. The authors also find that for employees covered by a collective agreement, the positive effects of high-involvement work practices are complementary with a union earnings premium.

Some caution is required in the interpretation of the results given the cross-sectional nature of the data. With cross-sectional data it is difficult to establish definitive causal and directional linkages between high-involvement measures and levels of earnings and earnings inequality.

For trade unions and their members, the results imply that the involvement practices as measured in this study are unlikely to substitute for the earnings premium associated with collective bargaining coverage. For human resource, increasing the earnings of low-paid employees may carry relatively marginal costs but the benefits maybe considerable in the form of employee engagement, increased effort levels and productivity gains.

This study extends the literature on the outcomes of high-involvement practices for employees and firms by addressing their association with employee earnings particularly at the lower end of the wage hierarchy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the experience of call centre employees who have been involved in high-involvement innovation (HII) activities to understand what frontline and managerial employees think of these involvement activities.

A qualitative case study approach is utilised, drawing on evidence from seven UK call centres. Various sources of data are examined, i.e. interviews, observation, call listening and documentary.

From the analysis of the testimonies, it is found that job design, the mechanisms and practices as well as other people’s perceptions of involvement influence the experience of frontline and managerial employees. The findings highlight that HII has the potential to intensify jobs (both frontline and managerial employees) when the quantity of ideas submitted becomes a component of the employee performance appraisal system.

This research has shown that the heightened targets used in many of the cases have reduced the ability of employees to be involved in any innovation activities. What is not clear from the findings is that if performance measures can be used in a more participative way with employees so that they can have less time pressure allowing them to become more involved in innovation activities. Thus, an interesting direction for future research would be to consider the effects of performance measurement systems in the role they play in facilitating HII activities.

The findings show that HII has the potential to enrich frontline employees’ jobs, making them feel more valued and giving them some variety and challenge in their job. Therefore, practitioners should approach employee involvement in the innovation process as something potentially fruitful and not just wasted time away from the phones.

This research is important as it explores what effects these involvement initiatives have on the employees and managers involved in them. This is valuable since there is no real consensus across human resource management, labour process and critical management fields resulting in a limited conceptualisation of the relationship between management practices, employee experiences and the outcomes. This research makes a contribution through the elaboration of current theory to understand the complexities and subtleties that exist between the high involvement management practices and the experience of workers and their managers.