Economic Advantages or Disadvantages of Employee Participation

Employee Participation in Decision Making

The basic requirement paper compare contrast readings topics common. MUST USE THE UPLOADED READINGS FOR THE PAPER. While readings sympathetic goal creating democratic participative organizations, critical.

Employee participation in decision-making

The participation of employees in the decision-making of a company or cooperative has its advantages and disadvantages. Employees are provided with the chance to take part in the decision-making, which in turn makes them more loyal towards the company. Participation will provide the employees with a voice, and this would capture their loyalty. With participation, it is possible that employees will push for their own vested interests, which might not be in line with the interests and goals of the company. The readings to be analyzed and discussed are The Case(s) for Participation and Democracy and Oligarchy in Israeli Worker Cooperatives. These two readings have some similarities in that they both discuss the effects of allowing employee participation in decision making. Raymond Russell uses bus cooperatives to demonstrate how employee participation can result in wrong decisions. Management teams voted for by the members run the bus cooperatives. The members are the employees. The management team has to campaign in order to get this positions, and they use all tricks available to win. The paper by Strauss George et al. (8) focuses on participation and the different levels of participation available. Each of the arguments for participation is analyzed briefly, and the writer tries to demonstrate how they each can improve an organization's performance.

Cooperatives are managed politically, and this causes them to have opposing teams with differing opinions, but a single goal of taking over leadership. This fact is demonstrated clearly by the different bus cooperatives written about in the paper. They all have the same goals of improving their services and employee welfare, but they fail once they are elected to positions of leadership. This result in internal wrangles and the employees are forced to start taking sides. Democracy is good within an organization, but it has been proven that democratically elected leaders do not mean they are qualified for the positions. The leaders succeeded in the elections because they were able to convince the members that they have better policies. According to Weber (220), selecting candidates to fill positions based on their technical skills would ensure that they are pure type candidates. This would also guarantee that the person performs their duties based on their capabilities. This way it is easy to eliminate candidates who have no experience or cannot manage to perform the assigned duties.

There are advantages for allowing employees to participate in the decision-making for the company. Looking at the article by George Strauss, it is clear that employees are more comfortable when they feel the direction the company is heading is steered by them and not the management. Managers are also able to gain employee loyalty as the employees are participating and they can own some of the decisions. Having a voice is vital as workers can complain against any issue they are faced with openly. There is also the possibility that their grievances will be listened to and acted upon. Unionists do not appreciate this loyalty, as they assume the managers are trying to weaken their influence over the employees (Strauss George et al. 9). What the unionists fail to realize is that when employees are happy, they will stay with the company for longer. There would be a decrease in the number of conflicts companies and unions, which is better for the industry.

The bus cooperatives had members who mostly were the bus drivers. These members had little say, but they participated in the some decision making. There are rules and regulations that would require a number of signatures before they are implemented. This is where the members participated in the decision-making. The management had to convince the members and demonstrate to them how the new rules would improve their working conditions. The cooperatives had different tenures for their managers. The elections were held either after two years or after four years depending on the cooperative (Russell 135). The cooperative did not have a vetting system to determine how qualified the leaders were, but the prospective and current leaders would listen and offer the members better job positions. This way they were using their influence and power to win over the members, which would ensure victory when elections come. The members might not have participated fully in the day-to-day operations of the cooperative, but they had a say when it came to salary negotiations and better working conditions. Using the opposition, the members could voice their concerns and they would be guaranteed that the opposition would use these grievances to push the leaders.

The disadvantage of having employees participating in decision-making is that they are likely to focus on what is in their best interests. Some employees might use this opportunity to further their own interests instead of performing their duties and responsibilities. This is evident in the bus cooperative if Israel. The members started creating positions that were irrelevant so that they could have board positions. These positions only served their interests of not wanting to work as bus drivers. Internal wrangles and divisive leadership led the cooperative to have leadership wars that were portrayed in the media. These issues were exaggerated in the media, but the analysis conducted by the authors did not reveal that the cooperatives would have performed differently if leadership were more conventional. The scandals that were reported in the media were not understood and were mostly misrepresented. The media should have understood that the scandals were due to democracy failure in the workplace. The cooperative used democracy to allow employee participation in the decision making. The democracy failed because there were many members who wanted to take leadership of the cooperatives (Russell Raymond 73). This resulted in continual changes within the leadership during the elections. Though this demonstrates that democracy within the workplace is working, it covers up the overall problem of allowing employee participation.