Contradictions Of Employee Involvement In Organizational Change

This monograph narrates the decade-long struggle of workers, unions, and management in transforming one of the largest ailing family-owned jute businesses in India, into a sustainable worker-owned and governed cooperative. It focuses on the variation in the three groups’ involvement in the transformation. It begins with the employees’ struggles in taking over the business, deserted by its owners, to save their jobs. The study analyzes the tensions between the three groups in creating and maintaining democratic governance that would sustain the initial leap in employee participation in the transformation. The analysis reveals contradictions at multiple levels, starting with the unexpected outcome of information sharing with workers: increased information sharing by management resulting in decreased employee involvement. The study explains this paradox by showing that for workers, information has a symbolic nature and information sharing is a signal of their trustworthiness in the assessment of those who are privy to the information. This means involvement is contingent upon the feeling that the information that workers consider crucial is being shared with them. However, what workers consider crucial, and thus a symbol of trust, changes over time as the nature and breadth of their involvement evolves. Thus, worker expectation as well as management and union expectation of information sharing evolves. However, the evolution has the potential to create a mismatch between the two expectations that might lead to contradictions in employee involvement. While for management, information sharing is an instrument in eliciting involvement, and thus management’s expectation of information sharing goes through an instrumental loop, for employees, information sharing is a matter of trust, and thus their expectation of information sharing goes through an institutional trust-based loop. To sustain high employee involvement, the organization should ideally institutionalize the trust-based loop and avoid engaging with the instrumental loop. The author proposes a collaborative approach to organizational transformation that will help deal with the contradictions more effectively, sustaining employee involvement in the transformation. The author also discusses the implications of these propositions for academic scholarship and organizational practices and situates them in the ongoing attempts to reform Industrial Disputes Act in India.

It examines political economy of neoliberalism and curates contemporary case studies of resistance and alternative organizing in India.

Change management and organizational development is unthinkable without people. Human beings form its core as both subjects and objects of change. This volume attempts to cut through to the core of change management, to the people that stand at its heart and focuses on their intrinsic role in change management and organizational development. Topics covered in this volume encompass the human element within organizational change, how this impacts roles, dynamics of team interaction and affects the workplace in teaching and learning settings. It also addresses resistance to institutional and organizational change and the central role that agile management plays in this process.

The success of organizational change in a world of increasing volatility is highly dependent on the advocacy of stakeholders. It is the link between strategic decision-making and effective execution, between individual motivation and product innovation, and between delighted customers and growing revenues. Only by engaging stakeholders does change have a chance to be successful. This book presents a coherent and practical view of how organizations might engender engagement with organizational change within their operational, tactical and strategic practices. It does this by providing a comprehensive review of the theoretical and empirical works on engagement and change from a variety of academic and practical perspectives. The academic research presented in this book is reinforced by research from consultancies as well as insights from practitioners that provide timely evidence. Ultimately the aim is to help raise awareness of the need to foster engagement with OC through a stakeholder perspective and how this can be done successfully within organizations across the globe. Employee Engagement for Organizational Change is a valuable textbook for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of organizational change, employee engagement, human resource management and leadership. Its balance of theory and practice also makes it a reliable resource for HR and organizational development practitioners.

This book explores a major media management topic on the basis of case study research conducted in European, US and Brazilian media companies. More specifically, it examines the dynamics of employee engagement, aiming at organizational development through change. The book contemplates the discipline of Media Management through a management lens and focuses on the concept of employee involvement and its value with regard to successfully introducing change and achieving organizational development. It concentrates on providing the necessary information and organizational arrangements from the points of view of media managers and employees and highlights how this involvement can encourage employees to create and innovate. The book is directed towards researchers and students, as well as practitioners/professionals involved with media organizations.

Comprising the study, documentation, and comparison of plant-level workers’ participation around the world, this volume meets the challenge of offering a global perspective on workers’ participation, representation, and models of social partnership. Value chains, economic life, inter-cultural exchange and knowledge, as well as the mobility of persons and ideas increasingly cross the borders of nation-states. In the knowledge age, the active participation of workers in organizations is crucially important for sustainable and long-term growth and innovation. This handbook offers lessons from historical, global accounts of workers’ participation at plant level, even as it looks forward to predict forthcoming trends in participation.