Employee involvement and participation
A dynamic human resource learning system is hard to maintain without a culture of active involvement and commitment among the employees. Without employee involvement and commitment important relations of importance for learning cannot be activated. This is the case for “communities of learning”,for dialogues on learning and competence development and not least for the organizational principles important to framing the learning communities. Most of these organizational principles depend on active employee involvement related to planning , executing and controlling the daily work. Implementation of these principles has furthered a change in management principles away from detailed operational control and towards management by more general objectives,values and structures. Bringing the employer involvement over the operational threshold and into innovative developments requires cooperation with management on levels above the daily work.
In some European countries and especially in Scandinavia there is a tradition of employee participation in institutional settings, where decisions go beyond the daily work and relate to the tactical and even the strategic level of the firm(Busck et al.,2010). For management these institutions are important forums for gaining operational information and not least establishing employee commitment on decisions with larger and more critical implications for the firm. For employees the benefits are indirect influence on these decisions, which may have profound influence on future work. Theoretically the indirect – participative – involvement – forms have been viewed as fundamentally different perspectives on the cooperation between management and employees in firms (Hyman and Mason,1995). The “involvement” perspective has its origin in management initiatives and interests in involving the employees in decisions that are directly related to their work tasks and processes. This perspective is founded in the relation between individual influence, motivation and performance in work. It is theoretically related to human relations, motivation and the employee relation approaches. The “participation” perspective has its origin in employee initiative and interest in democratic decision structures of working life with representative influence on decisions important for present and future work situation. This perspective is related to the interest of applying general democratic principles of decision making on relevant issues inside the “walls” of the firm and in this way contribute to management decision making. This perspective is founded in the collective view of interest relations in the firm and the industrial relation approach.
Research on private sector firm in Denmark has shown that are product and process innovative and have implemented many of the structural traits of the learning organization frequently combine or “bundle” instruments from the two perspectives on employee influence in what could be called “cooperation regimes” . In this way the instruments of collective and representative employee influence will go hand-in-hand with ad hoc project organization and work systems with organization traits providing direct influence for the employees(Nielsen,2004). This is consistent with the concept of dialogue between actors in and around the organization that we mentioned earlier. Building cooperation regimes may be an organization driver for developing commitment and compliance in relation to the challenges that the firms are confronted with in the global competitive environment. This again can be an important precondition for transforming innovation strategies and learning configurations to dynamic capabilities in the organization and innovative performance on the market . The decisive point is that the individual involvement and control over daily work are to be complemented with relational influence in the work group and collective influence in relation to management(Hvid,2009).