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The impact of employee involvement on small firms' financial performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 March 2020

Alex Bryson
Alex Bryson*
Affiliation:
Policy Studies Institute, London
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Abstract

The author examines the relationship between employee involvement (EI) and small firms‘ financial performance using statistical analyses of establishment-level data from the 1990 Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. The author finds EI practices and EI combinations which ‘work’ for small-firm establishments are very different from those that work for large-firm establishments. The least bureaucratic and least costly EI methods have the potential to benefit small firms most. Whether they actually do so depends on the array of other EI and non-EI practices in operation: an inappropriate configuration can have a negative effect on performance. The findings take account of factors associated with being an ‘EI firm’.

Type
Articles
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 169 , July 1999 , pp. 78 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference R000222294). The author thanks Net) Millward, his collaborator in the study from which this paper emanates. I also thank Michael White and Richard Dorsett at the Policy Studies Institute, and Chris Skinner and Ray Chambers at the University of Southampton, for useful comments. Copies of the data and computer programs used to generate these results are available from the author by e-mailing him at a.bryson@psi.org.uk.

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