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This article describes a shared ownership scheme developed by Advance Housing and Support so that people who have experienced mental health difficulties could have the choice to own their own home. Jennifer Barrett, Hilary Caldicott and Trevor Sasar De Sain have all been involved in Own Home ‐ one as the project manager and the other two as shared owners with the scheme ‐ and here describe what it was like from the inside, what worked and what didn't, and the impact of housing on people's experience of social exclusion and the accompanying loss of hope

The purpose of this article is to examine the outcomes of a substantial broad‐based employee share‐ownership scheme for employee attitudes and behaviour in a privatised firm.

Results are based on a survey of 711 employees in Eircom, an Irish telecommunications firm, which is 35 percent employee‐owned.

The ESOP has created sizable financial returns and has had extensive influence in firm governance at the strategic level. However, findings show only a limited impact on employee attitudes and behaviour. This is attributed to a failure in creating a sense of employee participation and line of sight between employee performance and reward.

The aim of employee share‐ownership often includes aligning employee objectives with those of other shareholders, and thus improving labour performance. The findings in this study highlight a need to provide employees with a sense of ownership and control. Findings also question the assumption that where employees have a substantial shareholding, they will focus on securing the long‐term prospects of the firm.

Little research has examined the impact of a large employee shareholding on attitudes and behaviour within a public‐quoted firm. The substantial and unparalleled size of the Eircom ESOP presented a unique opportunity to conduct such a study.

Using a random sample of 49 UK engineering companies, the influence of profit sharing, share‐option schemes and the perceived degree of employee participation in decision making on inter‐firm labour absenteeism rates are investigated. After controlling for a number of firm‐specific factors, suggested as theoretically appropriate in the extant literature, the key empirical results indicated that firms which had adopted sharing schemes appeared to experience significantly lower absenteeism rates than their non‐sharing counterparts.

The 1986 Green Paper on Profit‐related Pay (PRP) saw the initiative as contributing to the elimination of the “them and us mentality” from British industry. Considers the impact of PRP and shows the Green Paper’s view to be optimistic. This conclusion derives from an examination of the PRP scheme and its context within government policies on taxation, employment, industrial democracy and industrial relations. These are shown to be exacerbating the inequalities of reward and power out of which the categories “them and us” are structured. Given this, it is difficult to see PRP promoting industrial unitarism.

This paper aims to map some of the diversity in employee relations in Germany that is overlooked, first, within assessments of the German labour market that focus on the national level and second, within separate studies in this area that emphasize attempts by employers to circumvent important institutions.

The research adopts a quantitative approach to examine data for German manufacturing and service sectors on both the spread of industry‐wide collective agreements and the extent to which workers are paid wage rates that are higher than those set out in those agreements. It also assesses the prevalence of profit sharing and employee share ownership schemes.

Industry‐wide collective agreements are not the burden that they are often portrayed. Actual wage rates and the prevalence of profit sharing and ESOSs make German workplaces more heterogeneous than critics and advocates of the German economic model posit.

The data are limited to Germany; however, Germany occupies a prominent position, not just within much of the employment relations literature, but also in terms of economic output. The research is also limited by an inability to provide evidence on workplaces that undercut sectoral collective agreements and to disaggregate the data further by sector and firm size/location.

The paper provides a counterpoint to the portrayals of employee relations in Germany that often present a homogeneous picture of those relations. For the first time, data on the spread of profit sharing and employee share ownership schemes in German workplaces at the sectoral level are provided.

In this research, the authors try to answer the question of when broad-based employee share ownership (ESO) is more likely to be used and how it can be managed more effectively from the vertical fit perspective in strategic human resource management (HRM).

The study analyzes an unbalanced panel sample of 614 organizations (1,601 organization-year data points) in South Korea, utilizing hierarchical linear modeling (HLM).

The analysis demonstrates that organizations are more likely to adopt broad-based ESO when they utilize the prospector and analyzer strategies as opposed to the defender strategy. The analysis also reveals that the relationship between broad-based ESO and labor productivity is positive only when organizations utilize the prospector strategy as opposed to other types of strategies (i.e. analyzer and defender strategies).

The findings first indicate that the decision to adopt a broad-based ESO in organizations should be informed by their business strategy if they want to enhance labor productivity. Specifically, the results demonstrate that only the prospector firms, rather than defenders or analyzers, can reap the productivity benefit of broad-based ESO. Second, since innovation is a major source of productivity for prospector firms, the findings demonstrate that a broad-based ESO can be a vehicle that drives innovation. As a result, firms may want to consider utilizing broad-based ESOs to foster innovation.

The findings emphasize the relevance of the “vertical fit” perspective in examining the broad-based ESO and firm productivity relationship. Most past research utilized the “horizontal fit” framework in refining the relationship between broad-based ESO and productivity. Thus, the study emphasizes the need to utilize the “vertical fit” perspective, and not only the “horizontal fit” perspective, in the broad-based ESO research. Through this, the study meaningfully extends the research on the productivity effect of broad-based ESO by adding an important moderator (i.e. strategy) to the model.

This study investigates the relationship between financial participation plans, that is profit sharing, share plans and option plans, and firm financial performance using a longitudinal panel data set of non-financial listed companies for the period 1992–2009 comprising 2,216 observations. In addition, it makes a distinction between financial participation plans that are narrow based, directed to top management and executives only, and broad based, targeted to all employees. The panel data also allow us to take into account time lag effects, as profit sharing is usually said to have short-term effects while stock options and share plans are more targeted to longer term impact. Our results show that broad-based profit-sharing plans and combinations of broad-based profit sharing and share plans are positively related with many firm financial performance indicators relative to companies without these plans. However, the results consistently show negative associations between both narrow- and broad-based option plans and firm financial performance.

Senior management in the newly privatized water companies have been keen to secure employee commitment to the new commercial goals they are now pursuing. Considers the use of profit sharing as a rhetorical device for this purpose. The introduction of profit sharing schemes was intended by management not only to assist in the construction of a new version of organizational reality, but more particularly to communicate to organizational members the quite different ideological conceptualization of organizational purposes and activities associated with the change in status from public sector water authority to private sector water company. Reports research based on documentary evidence and interviews with managers from six of the new water companies which provides scope for comparisons between the companies high‐lighting different interpretations of the role profit sharing may play in the processes of organizational change.

Conservative Party comes out strongly in favour of Employee Share Ownership Schemes. Although employee shareholding schemes are becoming an important feature of industrial life in other countries, in Britain they have been neglected by employers and cold‐shouldered by unions. In France such schemes have been required in law since 1967 for companies employing more than 100 employees; in Sweden the movement has been going strongly for over 25 years, culminating in the Meidner Plan which would have required certain companies to hand over 20 per cent of their profits to union‐controlled employee funds; 18 million workers in West Germany benefit under employee share schemes and in the USA the movement flourishes more than anywhere else.

Research findings from a major survey of British practice.