Performance Appraisal Essay -- Business, Employees Participation

This paper assesses the Human Resource practices of employee participation and involvement and their relationship with productivity. An attempt will be made to distinguish between participation and involvement. Also the paper will focus on development and changing trends of employee participation and the evaluation of these participation schemes with respect to their depth, level, scope and form. Finally, a search into whether employee participation and involvement has a bearing on productivity will be considered. In recent times, a key feature of management practice has been the implementation of effective human development strategies to enhance organisational productivity. Human resource management is considered an important element in achieving an organization’s success and a means of gaining competitive advantage (Armstrong 2009).Again; it is common to have management grant some level of participation and involvement to employees concerning core decisions within the organisation, as researches have proved a link between employee involvement and participation having a positive bearing on workplace productivity and performance (Belanger 2000). Employee participation is promoted for different reasons and embedded in various institutional settings across industries and countries due to influences from the legal, economic, political framework found in each country .Thus the level of participation granted employees and the degree and methods of which employers are willing to use in workforce management differ everywhere (Dundon & Wilkinson2009). Participation and involvement as concepts are by definition intertwined and this makes it difficult to distinguish between them. However, some authors have attempted defining them... ...stantive. In conclusion, though it very difficult to justify empirically whether or not employee participation and involvement can increase a firm’s productivity; it can be said from a synthesis of the above discussion that productivity is dependent on several factors including employee participation and involvement. However to increase productivity, employers should adopt and implement the right strategy taking cognisance of organisational goals and existing work environment. In lieu of the above, Youndt et al. (1996) puts it so succinctly that employee involvement and participation is essential in the a firm’s production process since employees provide organizations with an important source of sustainable competitive advantage and that the effective management of human capital, not physical capital may be the ultimate determinant of organisational performance.