Dimensions and location of high‐involvement management: fresh evidence from the UK Commission's 2011 Employer Skills Survey

• Date: 01 April 2015
• Author: Mark Burridge,Sandra Nolte,Daniela Rudloff,William Green,Stephen Wood
• Published date: 01 April 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12064

Dimensions and location of high-involvement

management: fresh evidence from the UK

Commission’s 2011 Employer Skills Survey

Stephen Wood,Mark Burridge,Daniela Rudloff and William Green, School of

Management, University of Leicester

Sandra Nolte, Lancaster University Management School

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 25, no 2, 2015, pages 166–183

High-involvement management is typically seen as having three components: worker involvement, skill

and knowledge acquisition and motivational supports. The prescriptive literature implies the elements

should be used together; but using data from the UK Commission’s Employer Skills Survey of 2011 we

find that these dimensions of high-involvement management are in reality separate. Two types of

involvement, role and organisational, are not strongly related, and motivational supports are not strongly

correlated with other practices or each other. Size of workplace and the sector in which it operates are

associated with the dimensions of high-involvement management. However, there is variety in their other

predictors. For example, organisational involvement and skill acquisition are positively related to

workplace size while role involvement is negatively associated with it. The research illustrates the value

of scaling methods over blanket indexes to measure high involvement management and highlights the

independent effects of quality and operational management methods.

Contact: Stephen Wood, School of Management, University of Leicester, Ken Edwards

Building, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK. Email: s.j.wood@le.ac.uk

Keywords: high-involvement management; role involvement; organisational involvement; skill

acquisition; management practices; total quality management

INTRODUCTION

High-involvement management remains at the centre of modern management thinking,

as the virtues for a fast-changing economy of a specific system of human resource

management (HRM), centred on employee involvement and development, are

espoused. High-involvement practices are widely taken to include enriched job design,

teamwork, functional flexibility, idea-capturing, intensive training and development,

information-sharing, and appraisal (Appelbaum et al., 2000; De Menezes and Wood, 2006;

Kalleberg et al., 2006). Allied to these are motivational practices, which are aimed at aligning

individual and organisational goals and requirements, such as performance-related pay, equal

opportunity policies and work–life balance policies. It is typically advocated that such practices

should be used together and viewed as a synergistic set.

The concept of high-involvement management spawned a large stream of research testing

whether such an approach was associated with higher organisational performance (Wood, 1999;

Wall and Wood, 2005; Guest, 2011). Much of this produced positive results, but these were not

always consistent across surveys or performance measures within the same survey. Moreover,

the variety of practices across studies, as well as the methods of developing composite

methods, means that it is difficult to make firm conclusions about which practices are decisive

for performance, or whether indeed the total set is required.

bs_bs_banner

doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12064

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 2, 2015166

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Wood,S., Burridge, M., Rudloff, D., Green, W. and Nolte, S. (2015) ‘Dimensions and location of high-involvement

management: fresh evidence from the UK Commission’s 2011 Employer Skills Survey’. Human Resource Management Journal 25: 2, 166–183.

Initial studies centred on Lawler’s (1986) and Walton’s (1985) attempts to define an HRM

model based on the importance of job design, and this gave some rationale for the practices

included in them. But even in these studies, there appeared to be an element of expediency, as

practices that reflected innovations in the industries studied (e.g. Arthur, 1994) or sophisticated

personnel management, such as job analysis, were included (e.g. in Huselid, 1995). And many

studies excluded Lawler’s and Walton’s foundation, role involvement, a tendency that Wood

and Wall (2007) showed reflected an increasing focus, following resource-based theory, on

human resources as potentially unique assets at the expense of the empowerment of

non-managerial staff (e.g. Becker and Huselid, 1998).

Consequently, on the one hand, the selection of practices seems sometimes to be based more

on intuition about what might influence performance than any theoretical foundation or solid

empirical evidence. Yet, on the other hand, several studies make overt use of what is typically

known as the AMO (ability + motivation + opportunity to participate) theory (Boxall and

Purcell, 2003; Gerhart, 2007: 318–322). It is effectively an extension to the organisational level

of the psychological theory that individual performance is based on abilities, knowledge and

motivation. It also includes the opportunities individuals have for involvement and the way

their work context is designed to aid this. It thus differentiates three dimensions or subsystems

of high-involvement management: (a) a work organisation element that is about the

opportunities for employee involvement and participation, (b) a training and development

component that is concerned with human capital or skill and knowledge acquisition, and (c)

a motivation enhancement component that involves incentives to perform in order to ensure

that employees are motivated to use their discretion in line with the organisation’s objectives

(Appelbaum et al., 2000; De Menezes and Wood, 2006; Kalleberg et al., 2006).

The prescription underlying the high-involvement management concept is that the practices

associated with this triad ought to be used together. Nevertheless, the limited tests of whether

the types of practices are used in concert have suggested they may not (De Menezes and Wood,

2006). Moreover, within studies of their performance effects those assessing the impact of

subdivisions of practices have perhaps produced the most promising results: different subsets

may be more significant for performance than others, or may influence performance through

distinct routes (Subramony, 2009; Wood et al., 2012).

In this article, we test whether all the practices associated with high-involvement

management tend to coexist, or whether various sets of practices form discrete elements. We

then examine how this reflects the differences in the predictors of the use of each dimension

– that is variations between the dimensions in the types of organisations that score high on

each. The research is based on data from the UK Commission’s Employer Skills Survey of 2011.

HIGH-INVOLVEMENT MANAGEMENT

The concept of high-involvement management

High-involvement management is often treated as synonymous with high-performance work

systems, but this is to prejudge its performance effects. Moreover, it risks underplaying

differences in the HRM literature as to what are the critical components within HRM systems

for performance. High-involvement management’s focus on employee involvement is popular,

but by no means universal. Such labels describe what Boxall and Macky (2009: 8) call ‘the

dominant theme informing a stream of managerial action’, in which we are interested.

Applying this notion, high-involvement management may be differentiated from Walton’s

(1985) high-commitment management, when the two are often treated as synonymous. For

while in both concepts empowerment is the bedrock of the system of management, the

Stephen Wood, Sandra Nolte, Mark Burridge, Daniela Rudloff and William Green

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 2, 2015 167

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.