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Book part
Publication date: 6 June 2017

Erik Poutsma, Paul E. M. Ligthart and Eric C. A. Kaarsemaker

This chapter addresses employee ownership within a strategic human resource management (SHRM) framework that has gained increased attention. The study extends the configurational…

Abstract

This chapter addresses employee ownership within a strategic human resource management (SHRM) framework that has gained increased attention. The study extends the configurational approach to SHRM and argues that the construct of the workforce philosophy is the primary factor that determines the coherence of HRM systems. In other words, the workforce philosophy propagates the idea that employees both deserve to be co-owners and must be taken seriously as such. In addition, the chapter argues that the HRM system should reflect this workforce philosophy: the HRM system should contain HRM practices that mirror the rights that comprise the very construct of “ownership.” We present the possible core HRM practices of the “ownership high-performance work system (O-HPWS),” which, similar to employee ownership, produces favorable outcomes. The chapter also addresses the important mediating role of employees’ perception and attributions related to employee share ownership in the relationship of the HRM system (with employee share ownership) to favorable outcomes.

Article
Publication date: 17 October 2023

Niels Mygind

The purpose of this paper is to give an updated overview over the development of employee-ownership in Italy, France, Spain including Mondragon, the UK and the US with relatively…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to give an updated overview over the development of employee-ownership in Italy, France, Spain including Mondragon, the UK and the US with relatively many employee-owned firms. How have the barriers for employee-ownership been overcome in these countries?

Design/methodology/approach

The overview is based on updated descriptions of the development of employee-ownership included in this special issue. The analysis follows the structure of overcoming five barriers: the organization problem; the problem of entry and exit of employee-owners; the startup and takeover problem; the capital- and the risk problem.

Findings

Italy, France and Spain have overcome the barriers by specific legislation for worker cooperatives, this includes rules for entry and exit of employee members. Cooperative support organizations play an important role for monitoring and managing the startup problem and for access to capital. The Mondragon model includes individual ownership elements and a group structure of cooperatives. The EOT and ESOP models are well suited for employee takeovers, financing are eased by tax advantages and they are all-employee schemes. While the EOT has no individual risks, the ESOP model has the possibility for capital gains for employees but also the risk of losing these gains.

Originality/value

Comprehensive and updated overview of the development in employee-ownership in the five countries to identify successful formats of employee-ownership for implementation in countries with few employee-owned firms.

Details

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, vol. 6 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-7641

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 20 June 2022

Ni-Yun Chen

This study examines whether insider share ownership and personal share collateral affect corporate payout decisions.

Abstract

Purpose

This study examines whether insider share ownership and personal share collateral affect corporate payout decisions.

Design/methodology/approach

This study estimates logit, Tobit and ordinary least squares regression models to explore how insider ownership is related to share repurchase probability, completion rates and the long-term performance following the repurchase announcements and how insider share collateral affects the above associations.

Findings

The results show that insider share ownership is negatively associated with the probability of announcing share repurchases and repurchase completion rates and is positively associated with the firm's post-announcement performance. This study further explores the incentive of insiders with high share collateral announcing share repurchases under a threat of margin call. For firms with a high percentage of insider share collateral, the results show that insider share ownership is associated with higher repurchase probability but is associated with lower repurchase completion rates and poorer post-announcement performance.

Originality/value

This study clarifies the interrelationships between insider ownership, insider share collateral and decisions in share repurchases and subsequent performance. This study provides evidence for both the convergence of interest and the entrenchment theories.

Details

Managerial Finance, vol. 48 no. 11
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0307-4358

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 17 July 2017

Niels Mygind and Benjamin Faigen

Little systematic work has been completed on the incidence of employee ownership in a Chinese context. Similar to the situation in Eastern Europe, this type of ownership was quite…

Abstract

Purpose

Little systematic work has been completed on the incidence of employee ownership in a Chinese context. Similar to the situation in Eastern Europe, this type of ownership was quite widespread in China, particularly during the 1990s. Based on the existing literature and available statistical data, the purpose of this paper is to identify drivers of, and barriers to, the development of employee ownership in China.

Design/methodology/approach

The scattered evidence from the literature and official statistical sources are collected and structured in a systematic analysis where the drivers and barriers for employee ownership in the transition process from plan to market are identified at three levels: society, the company and the individual.

Findings

Employee ownership developed as a transitory stage between state and private ownership; employees acquired ownership stakes as part of the privatisation of small- and medium-sized state-owned enterprises as well as collectively owned enterprises. However, in most cases the dynamics of ownership resulted in dominant ownership by managers. This trend became more noticeable at later stages of the privatisation process.

Research limitations/implications

The paper shows how policies and institutional settings at the society level are determining for the development of employee ownership.

Originality/value

The contribution of the paper is to give a general and systematic analysis of the development of employee ownership in China both based on a comprehensive literature review and by utilising existing statistical sources.

Details

International Journal of Emerging Markets, vol. 12 no. 3
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1746-8809

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 August 2018

Joseph Blasi, Douglas Kruse and Richard B. Freeman

The purpose of this paper is to review the historical background for broad-based ownership in the USA, the development of forms of employee ownership and profit sharing in the…

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to review the historical background for broad-based ownership in the USA, the development of forms of employee ownership and profit sharing in the USA, the research literature on employee ownership and profit sharing and related employee participation, the development of policy and options for new policies.

Design/methodology/approach

It is a literature review.

Findings

There are four reasons to be interested in employee stock ownership and profit sharing today: first, employee share ownership and profit sharing can increase worker pay and wealth and broaden the overall distribution of income and wealth, a key ingredient for a successful democracy. To be a tool for reducing inequality, employee stock ownership and profit sharing must be spread more widely and meaningfully than it is today. Second, employee share ownership and profit sharing provide incentives for more effort, cooperation, information sharing and innovation that can improve workplace performance and company productivity. Third, employee share ownership and profit sharing can save jobs by enhancing firm survival and employment stability, with wider economic benefits that come from decreasing unemployment. Fourth, employee share ownership and profit sharing can create more harmonious workplaces with greater corporate transparency and increased worker involvement in their work lives through access to information and participation in workplace decisions.

Research limitations/implications

Growth has been extraordinarily sluggish in the recovery from the Great Recession and has weakened in advanced countries over a longer period, leading some analysts to believe that the authors have entered a new economic era of small to modest growth. This may turn out to be true, which will increase the importance of growth-enhancing policies. The evidence that firms with employee stock ownership and/or profit-sharing perform better than others suggests that policies that extend ownership would boost the country’s lagging growth rate. The evidence that employee share ownership firms preserve jobs and survive recessions better than others suggests that policies that extend ownership could help stabilize the economy when the next recession comes down the pike.

Practical implications

Because there may be informational or institutional barriers about the benefits of ownership and sharing and the ways firms can introduce such programs that government can help overcome. Government has often played a role in promoting performance-enhancing work practices to enhance overall economy-wide outcomes from higher productivity and innovation, such as the long history of agricultural extension services (since 1887) to spread information on best practices in farming, and employer education on safety practices conducted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Social implications

Because of the “externalities” – effects that extend beyond the firm and its members – that greater ownership/profit sharing can bring us. If employee ownership and profit sharing lead to fewer layoffs and firm closures, this can reduce recession-created drops in consumer purchasing power and aggregate demand; government expenditures on unemployment compensation and other forms of support; decreased tax base for supporting schools and infrastructure; and potentially harmful social and personal effects, such as marital breakups and alcohol abuse. Apart from unemployment, more broadly shared prosperity and lower inequality may also have wider benefits for macroeconomic growth, stability and societal outcomes, as described by a number of social scientists. To the extent the ownership and profit sharing is a public good, a nudge in policy to consider the idea makes sense.

Originality/value

Because it is hard to find policy options that are as bipartisan as the shares policy. In The Citizens’ Share, and in other articles and venues, the authors lay out the areas in which there is evidence or logic for in-depth development of, and experimentation with, several broad policy directions, with the details to be worked out by members of Congress based on their deliberations.

Details

Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership, vol. 1 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 2514-7641

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 March 2022

Murat Ocak

This paper aims to examine the effect of audit firm governance on audit quality. Audit firm governance is broken down into two categories, namely, board ownership and engagement…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the effect of audit firm governance on audit quality. Audit firm governance is broken down into two categories, namely, board ownership and engagement partner ownership.

Design/methodology/approach

Audit firms from Borsa Istanbul and their clients who are quoted there as well were used to test the hypotheses. The final sample covers 1,291 observations at the client level between 2013 and 2019. Ordinary least square was conducted to test the hypotheses. Heckman selection model and instrument variable regression with two-stage least square (IVREG with 2SLS) were also used to control the self-selection and endogeneity problems, respectively. To enhance the validity of the main results, alternative audit quality measures were used.

Findings

The empirical findings show that board ownership and engagement partner ownership have an impact on audit quality. The results indicate that engagement partners with high shares enhance audit quality only in Big4 audit firms. The positive effect of higher board ownership on audit quality is more prominent in non-Big4 firms. The Heckman two-stage procedure and IVREG with 2SLS were conducted, both of which were consistent with the main results. The results regarding alternative audit quality measures are in accordance with the main estimation results.

Originality/value

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study examining the impact of audit firm board ownership on audit quality. In addition, this paper further advances the literature by investigating the effects of ownership at engagement partner levels on audit quality in the context of an emerging market, Turkey.

Details

Journal of Financial Reporting and Accounting, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1985-2517

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 10 April 2017

Héctor Simón Moreno, Núria Lambea Llop and Rosa Maria Garcia Teruel

The global economic crisis and the housing bubble meltdown have had a significant impact on the Spanish property market. As a result, the homeownership–tenancy dichotomy has…

Abstract

Purpose

The global economic crisis and the housing bubble meltdown have had a significant impact on the Spanish property market. As a result, the homeownership–tenancy dichotomy has become a matter of discussion, and efforts are made to discover formulas that provide affordable, stable and flexible housing access. Taking this background into account, the Catalan lawmaker has implemented the so-called “intermediate tenures” (temporal ownership and shared ownership) into the Catalan Civil Code, which are conceived as a middle ground between ownership and renting. This paper aims to explores how these “intermediate tenures” work.

Design/methodology/approach

These tenures are conceived as a middle ground between ownership and renting and may be used for a variety of purposes. As the Catalan lawmaker has fragmented the right of ownership on the basis of English law, which is a great breakthrough regarding the long-standing conception of the right of ownership in continental legal systems, the paper explores how these “intermediate tenures” work, as regulated in Act 19/2015, in a comparative perspective.

Findings

The paper offers an overview of how these “intermediate tenures” are regulated and which are the problems arising from legislation and the potential uses.

Originality/value

As the temporal ownership confers on the titleholder the domain of an asset for a specifically defined period of time, it does not conform to the right of ownership as it is currently conceived in continental European legal systems, given that it is based on the English leasehold; shared ownership confers on the buyer a property share in the thing, entitling him to the full possession, use and exclusive enjoyment of the thing and to gradually acquire the remaining share. Both are based on the English shared ownership scheme and leasehold, and are legal transplants worth to be analysed.

Details

International Journal of Law in the Built Environment, vol. 9 no. 1
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1756-1450

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 4 October 2011

Christine Whitehead and Sarah Monk

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of affordable home ownership in the light of the recent global financial crisis.

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of affordable home ownership in the light of the recent global financial crisis.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper draws on recent research conducted by the authors and others which included analysis of secondary data and policy documents and interviews with key stakeholders including housing associations and developers. The theoretical scope of the paper is outlined in the first section which looks at the principles behind the two main approaches to providing affordable home ownership: shared equity and shared ownership. Given continuing aspirations on the part of most households in England to become home owners, the key comparison is with the attributes of full ownership.

Findings

The paper finds that the main products share many of the attributes of full home ownership while remaining more affordable. The economic situation post‐2007 made both shared ownership and shared equity more difficult. The crisis and its aftermath also suggest that there is a need to develop a more robust and longer term market in equity sharing. This could be of real significance into the longer term, especially if the availability of mortgage finance remains constrained for many years to come. The paper concludes that in the longer term, developing a range of partial tenures which provide most of the benefits of owner‐occupation but which reduce risks to individual households and improve affordability in the early years is a desirable strategy.

Practical implications

There are clear implications for policy makers in other countries, notably the benefits from developing an intermediate tenure market which includes institutional equity and risk taking rather than continued large‐scale reliance on debt finance.

Originality/value

Given stated governmental ambitions to meet housing aspirations, this paper clarifies how it is possible to meet an identified need for affordable home ownership products to fill the growing “gap” between first‐time buyers who can purchase with parental help and those who have no means of achieving home ownership, even though they have the income to support such a choice.

Details

International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, vol. 4 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 1753-8270

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 16 August 2021

Aidan Vining, Mark Moore and Claude Laurin

This paper addresses the social value of commercial enterprises that are jointly owned by a government and private sector investors and where the shares are listed on a stock…

Abstract

Purpose

This paper addresses the social value of commercial enterprises that are jointly owned by a government and private sector investors and where the shares are listed on a stock exchange: thus, “listed public–private enterprises” (LPPEs). The theoretical part of the paper addresses how differences in ownership patterns influence the behavior and performance of LPPEs.

Design/methodology/approach

We develop a conceptual taxonomy, drawing on the empirical evidence on the behavior and performance of public–private hybrid enterprises and on the application of agency theory to that evidence. The taxonomy discussion predicts how different ownership patterns affect enterprise productive efficiency and the ability of governments to achieve social goals through LPPEs. We review the empirical literature on government enterprise ownership and on the concentration of private share ownership to deduce how these matter for owner and managerial behavior and productive efficiency. We review the literature that considers the informational content that listing of an enterprise's shares on a stock exchange can provide to enterprise owners, managers and other domestic audiences with a policy interest. We employ a social welfare perspective to derive policy implications as to when the LPPE governance structure is most appropriate.

Findings

We show how the monitoring and performance weaknesses of state ownership are offset by some private ownership, particularly when combined with listing on a stock exchange. We demonstrate the effects of different governance structures on enterprise productive efficiency. We find that the LPPE structure is particularly appropriate as an alternative to nationalization or to full privatization and regulation of natural monopoly public utilities, and as an alternative to full private ownership and taxation of non-renewable natural resource extractive enterprises.

Originality/value

This paper explicitly addresses the question of why and how the combination of government ownership, private investor ownership and listing on an exchange is socially valuable in providing information on productive efficiency to governments.

Details

International Journal of Public Sector Management, vol. 35 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3558

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 6 June 2017

Erik Poutsma, Paul E. M. Ligthart and Ulke Veersma

Taking an international comparative approach, this chapter investigates the variance in the adoption of employee share ownership and stock option arrangements across countries. In…

Abstract

Taking an international comparative approach, this chapter investigates the variance in the adoption of employee share ownership and stock option arrangements across countries. In particular, we investigate the influence of multinational enterprises (MNEs), industrial relations factors, HRM strategies, and market economies on the adoption and spread of the arrangements across countries. We find that industrial relations factors do not explain the variance in adoption by companies in their respective countries. MNEs and HRM strategies are important drivers of adoption. Market economy does not moderate the influence of MNEs on adoption, suggesting that MNEs universally apply the arrangements across borders.

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