In recent years, employee involvement has gained attention by academics and practitioners. A body of research has been accumulated to examine the impacts of this new form of work organization on these aspects. Practitioners are also eager to know the effectiveness of various employee involvement programs in terms of their effects on employees' attitudes and behaviors, as well as firm performance. Without digging into the nature of diverse employee involvement programs, it is difficult to know the reasons why some employee involvement programs outperform others in evaluating the effects of these employee involvement programs on firm performance. I suggest that researchers should investigate the effects of employee involvement programs on the control of non
managerial employees in order to know better the differences among diverse employee involvement programs. This study demonstrates that employee involvement programs indeed enhance the control of non
managerial employees through management sharing of information with them and their participation in decision-making in personnel-related, production-related as well as strategic issues. In particular, those programs
with higher levels of involvement tend to have larger effects on the control of non-managerial employees. Thus, the degree of control held by non
managerial employees depends on the types of employee involvement programs.
This study has filled the research gap in the area of employee participation by investigating the effects of employee involvement on the control of non-managerial employees in more detail. It found significantly positive effects of some employee involvement programs on the control of non-managerial employees and showed differences in the magnitude of the effects associated with different types of employee involvement. Although this study initiated such research effort, there are some limitations to be overcome in the future research. First, employee involvement programs surveyed in this study are nominal, without getting information about the contents and characteristics associated with these programs. Future research should collect much more detailed information on each employee involvement program. Second, respondents of the survey questionnaires were typically management, who might have prejudices on the questions related to the control of non-managerial employees. In order to objectively measure the degree of control of non-managerial employees, future research should collect data on the part of non-managerial employees to generate better measurements. Third, the sample of this study restricts to the case of Minnesota firms. Although it might show some evidence on employee involvement in the United States, more data should be collected from other part of the world in order to generalize the research results.
Fourth, the time when the study was conducted might cause readers to be suspicious of the results of the study. The future research should collect new data on employee involvement in order to verifY the validity of the findings ofthis study.
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The Effects of Employee Involvement on the Control of Employees 141
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