Participation

Establishment level data from the 1990 British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey are used to analyse links between employee involvement, contingent pay, collective representation and six different indicators of workplace performance: productivity levels and growth, employment changes, the climate of management-employee relations, quits and absenteeism. This information is then distilled to study the respective performance of three forms of workplace governance: employee involvement (EI), collective bargaining and authoritarian. Workplaces with EI governance have the best productivity performance, but authoritarian workplaces have lower quits, lower absenteeism and a better climate of industrial relations than the EI workplaces.