Where Informality Really Matters: Patterns of Employee Involvement and Participation (EIP) in a Non‐Union Firm

• Date: 01 January 2013
• Author: Jane Suter,Mick Marchington
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12004
• Published date: 01 January 2013

Where Informality Really Matters: Patterns of

Employee Involvement and Participation (EIP) in

a Non-Union Firm

MICK MARCHINGTON and JANE SUTER*

Industrial relations scholars have long been interested in notions of employee

involvement, participation, voice, and industrial democracy but the terminology is

so elastic that the types of practices covered are extremely broad. In this article,

following a brief discussion that categorizes employee involvement and participa-

tion (EIP) in terms of degree, level, and scope, we focus on the relatively dilute

formal and informal practices which operate at workplace level in non-union

f‌irms. Although researchers now examine direct—as well as representative—

forms of EIP, we argue the focus is still on formal systems. This f‌inding is under-

standable both from a methodological and a theoretical angle, but it leaves a gap

in our awareness of how EIP functions at workplace level, and in particular, the

role played by line managers in developing informal communication and consulta-

tion in non-union f‌irms. In this article, we examine formal and informal EIP

within a large non-union f‌irm in the UK hospitality sector; a context characterized

by intense product and labor market pressures and limited union presence. Our

principal conclusion is that informality takes centre stage in this organization, dri-

ven by managerial and worker preferences for informal EIP in the context of

close working relations at the customer interface. Moreover, customer pressures

and f‌lexible working patterns make it diff‌icult to sustain formal EIP in the context

of a capability framework that puts a primacy on managers using informal

approaches. However, it is argued that informal EIP needs to be combined with

the formal system to operate effectively.

Introduction

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS SCHOLARS HAVE LONG BEEN INTERESTED IN NOTIONS OF

employee involvement, participation, voice, and industrial democracy but the

* The authors’aff‌iliations are, respectively, Emeritus Professor of Human Resource Management, Man-

chester Business School, United Kingdom and Professor of Human Resource Management, Strathclyde Busi-

ness School, United Kingdom. E-mail: mick.marchington@mbs.ac.uk; Lecturer in Human Resource

Management, The York Management School, University of York, United Kingdom

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 52, No. S1 (January 2013). ©2012 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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terminology is so elastic that the types of practices covered are extremely

broad. These vary from the more far-reaching forms of representation, such as

worker directors and works councils, through to more dilute and localized

forms of communication and consultation via line managers at the workplace

level. The purpose of this article is to focus on the latter, not only because this

is typically overlooked in most studies, but also because it is more common in

non-union settings that lack an independent union presence. We acknowledge

that this is not an examination of radical forms of industrial democracy that

may challenge the status quo but instead, day-to-day interactions that can inf‌lu-

ence and shape workplace decisions. We term this “employee involvement and

participation”(EIP).

EIP can be broken down into a number of characteristics—degree, level,

and scope (Marchington and Wilkinson 2005). The degree of EIP assesses the

extent to which workers and/or their representatives inf‌luence management

decisions, ranging from information dissemination at one extreme through to

codetermination at the other, with two-way communication and consultation in

between. The majority of EIP schemes in non-union f‌irms tend to be relatively

low on this escalator, a mix of information-passing and two-way communica-

tion with some informal consultation. However, depending on management

style, it is possible that workers can have a higher degree of inf‌luence over

decisions at the workplace. Level refers to the point in the organization at

which EIP takes place—workplace, establishment, division, and headquarters.

Although EIP can exist at HQ or regional level in a multinational organization

through worker directors, for example, most forms tend to be concentrated at

or below the establishment level, particularly in non-union f‌irms where work-

ers lack collective organization across the company. Scope relates to the range

of decisions over which the non-managerial staff has some input; this can vary

from long-term strategic decisions that impact the business through to what

might be termed trivial matters—such as the date or theme of the Christmas

Party—that have little or no inf‌luence on key management decisions. As with

the other characteristics, it is unlikely that strategic issues are a part of EIP in

non-union f‌irms.

Studies typically focus on indirect (or representative) forms via trade unions

(Heery and Frege 2006) that are located at the establishment level or above,

and focus on more strategic decisions. However, there has recently been a

growing interest in forms of non-union EIP and its comparison specif‌ically

with participation in unionized organizations (Gollan, Poutsma, and Veersma

2006; Tarras and Kaufman 2006; for example). Although such contributions

are valuable, they still privilege forms of employee representation that have lit-

tle immediate relevance for most workers. However, interest has also grown in

forms of direct EIP, such as team brief‌ings, town-hall meetings, problem-solv-

Where Informality Really Matters / 285