The ‘reach’ of employee participation in decision‐making: exploring the Aristotelian roots of workplace democracy

• Published date: 01 July 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12050
• Date: 01 July 2015

The ‘reach’ of employee participation in

decision-making: exploring the Aristotelian roots of

workplace democracy

Andrew R. Timming, School of Management, University of St Andrews

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 25, no 3, 2015, pages 382–396

This article examines the ‘reach’, or the distribution, of employee participation in decision-making

(PDM) within organisations. It makes a unique contribution to the wider employee voice literature by

asking what types of employees have a ‘say’ in strategic decision-making and, in similar vein, what types

of employees are denied participation, and why. In order to answer this under-investigated research

question, the article presents an Aristotelian analysis of the concept of citizenship in the ‘best regime’.

In the light of this analysis, the article concludes that some groups of employees are excluded from PDM

on the basis of a perceived lack of ‘excellence’.

Contact: Dr Andrew R. Timming, Reader in Management, School of Management, University

of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife KY16 9RJ, UK. Email: art2@st-andrews.ac.uk

Keywords: Aristotle, employee voice, participation, political philosophy

INTRODUCTION

This article posits an important, albeit largely under-investigated, research question: why

do some types of employees have a greater ‘say’ in organisational decision-making than

others? The fundamental assumption at the heart of this article is that participation in

decision-making (hereafter ‘PDM’) is not distributed equally across groups of employees.

Following Ramsay and Scholarios (2005), PDM can be expected to vary between worker

groups, with some having more ‘voice’ than others. Precisely why some employees enjoy

relatively deeper and more meaningful PDM is an area of research that deserves further

exploration. The present study seeks to better understand this question by transposing the

political philosophy of Aristotle (1996) into the domain of workplace democracy.

This research contributes to the philosophical (Pateman, 1970; Merrill, 1996; Yazdani, 2010)

and historical (Ackers, 2010; Kaufman, 2014) development of employee participation, as well as

to the broader theory of employee voice. On this point, Wilkinson et al. (2014) identify five

‘theoretical strands’ in the voice literature: HRM, political science, transaction cost economics,

labour process theory and organisational behaviour. The present study adds value primarily to

the political science and HRM strands. With respect to political science, it examines the politics

of employee PDM in the light of the Aristotelian concept of citizenship (Johnson, 1984; Frank,

2004; Collins, 2006). In order to carry out this unique analysis, an imperfect metaphor is drawn

between the politics of the state and the politics of the organisation (McMahon, 1994). With

respect to HRM, this study explains the downward delegation of decision-making as a function

of the extent to which employees are thought by management to possess ‘excellence’ that

qualifies them to participate in corporate governance and contribute to upward

problem-solving (Wilkinson et al., 2004).

In spite of the fact that The Politics extends back 400 years before Christ, it is still a useful

framework for purposes of understanding the distribution of decision-making authority in the

modern organisation. In short, Aristotle (1996) examines the different configurations of

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doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12050

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 25 NO 3, 2015382

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Timming,A.R. (2015) “The ‘reach’ of employee participation in decision-making: exploring the Aristotelian roots

of workplace democracy”. Human Resource Management Journal 25: 3, 382–396.