High Involvement Management

QUESTION 3

High involvement management came into play in the early 1980s. Founded by an American organizational psychologist, Edward E. Lawler the third, it was similar to what Walton and Beer called high commitment management (Lawler (1986); Walton (1984); Beer et al. (1984)). High involvement management was described by these authors as an innovative approach to management that would, and that they felt should, take over the Taylorist model, or what Walton called the control approach, which, according to Walton (1995)) was characterised by its tight division of labour, narrowly defined jobs, fewer opportunities for employee involvement and substantially lower levels of worker trust and commitment.

According to Bloom and Van Reenen, High involvement management can largely impact on firm and employees. Although the view is that firms adopt these management practices to reach positive results and outcomes within the workplace. Despite that, it is less clear whether these practices also benefit employees directly. Much less is known about the effects of high involvement management with regards to employees’ health and other important elements of well-being at work compared to the effects on the firm itself. The impacts on employees are potentially very important, because employee well-being is usually linked to higher productivity, higher efficiency and fewer sickness-related absences. Thus, if high involvement management generates negative effects on employees' well-being (e.g. increased stress and mental tension due to more responsibility within the workplace), the direct positive effects on firm productivity may be sacrificed or harmed, at least to an extent.

According to War (2002), when considering the impact of high involvement management with regards to the physical and mental well-being of employees, it is useful to identify three dimensions of job-related well-being. The three dimensions of well-being directly related to the job itself are between job satisfaction and dissatisfaction, between contentment and anxiety, and finally, between enthusiasm and depression (Warr, 2002). According to Wood and Bryson, the job satisfaction-dissatisfaction part is concerned with the pleasure a person gains from their job and their affective attachment to it, while the contentment-anxiety and enthusiasm-depression dimensions are identified on the basis of their relationship to arousal in terms of mental alertness and energy. Also, anxiety is associated with low affect and high arousal while contentment is associated with high affect and low arousal (Wood, Bryson) Enthusiasm is associated with high affect and high arousal, while depression is associated with low affect and low arousal. Job strain is often taken to be a combination of anxiety and depression (Wood, Bryson).

There are several elements to employee well-being that can be discussed. There are different impacts high involvement management can have on employees’ well-being. According to Böckerman, Bryson, Ilmakunnas (2011), if high involvement management improves the working lives of employees by providing them with greater job autonomy, better interaction within the workplace, and more positive mental stimulation, it may then improve employees’ well-being. On the other hand, if the main objective of high involvement management is to increase productivity of the firm by intensifying workers’ workloads, it may lead to higher levels of exhaustion, mental burnout, injury, absences and illness. (Böckerman, Bryson, Ilmakunnas 2011)