Financial Participation: Does the Risk Transfer Story Hold in France?

Several articles report a positive effect of financial participation (profit sharing (PS) and employee share ownership) on firms' economic performance. This increase can be obtained in two main ways: by increasing the effort (extrinsic, intrinsic or commitment) of workers, directly or indirectly through worker selection; or by transferring more risk to the workers. The question is, of course, not neutral. Indeed, if the risk transfer story is true then it means that the increase of economic performance is obtained at the expense of workers, who take on the burden of more risks. The question is especially important in France where financial participation is associated with tax exemption for firms and where it is forbidden by law to substitute base wage and PS. The purpose of our article is to use an employer–employee dataset to answer the question of whether financial participation schemes are mainly designed as a risk transfer (from firms to workers) device.     

Incentives,Monitoring, and Employee Stock Ownership Plans: New Evidence and Interpretations

This paper reviews the theory and evidence for agency theory‐based explanations for employee stock ownership plans found in the financial participation literature. The UK Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 is used to test whether share plans substitute for direct monitoring and individual incentives. Contrary to some predictions in the literature, individual incentives are found to be complements of share plans, while other measures of monitoring costs provide mixed results. However, it is found that monitoring costs and a wide range of performance targets explain the conjunction of stock plans and individual incentives. It is suggested that share plans are used to mitigate dysfunctional effects of individual incentives by engendering cooperation and trust, and by broadening the range and time frame of desired performance outcomes.     

Employee Financial Participation and Productivity: An Empirical Reappraisal

Avner Ben‐Ner and Derek Jones cast doubt on the notion of a simple causal link between financial participation (FP) and productivity, and consequently on the validity of much of the empirical literature that has sought to quantify this relationship. This paper is an attempt to investigate this proposition. Our empirical reappraisal revealed that the route through which employee share ownership and profit‐sharing schemes achieve these gains is quite separate and more involved than either the theory or prior empirical research suggests. This is particularly evident by extending the complementarities thesis beyond purely participatory bundles to embrace firm‐specific and organizational variables. Our analysis also addressed recent calls to aid the interpretation of the observed effects of FP by creating a link between the use and operation of FP and its impact on productivity.     

Employee stock ownership and corporate R&D expenditures: evidence from Taiwan's information-technology industry

This study investigates how employee stock ownership affects corporate R&D expenditures for information-technology firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange during 1996–2001. The empirical results indicate a positive association between implementing employee stock ownership and R&D expenditures. The evidence thus supports the argument that employee stock ownership could help alleviate agency conflicts between employees and shareholders, and reduce agency costs, in turn enabling firms to make sizable R&D expenditures.

Do Employee‐Owned Firms Produce More Positive Employee Behavioural Outcomes? If Not Why Not? A British‐Spanish Comparative Analysis

Whether ‘employee ownership’ takes the form of worker cooperatives, co‐ownership or simply employee share ownership plans, there are normally high expectations that a range of positive outcomes will result. Yet many empirically based studies tend to find a much more complex picture. An influential segment of that empirical literature has posited the need for a number of mutually reinforcing workforce management components to be in place alongside co‐ownership. Drawing on detailed case research in two large and successful co‐owned retailers in Spain and Britain this paper examines the role of these wider elements supporting employee ownership. We find that employee ownership can be linked to higher productivity and lower employee turnover, while at the same time being linked to higher absenteeism and mixed effects on attitudes. Expectations held by managers and employees are higher; these expectations are not always fully met. The role of managers was also found to be crucial.     

Employee share ownership and job attitudes: The effects of share sale

Although the association between employee share ownership and job attitudes has been documented in the literature, little attention has been paid to the association with share sale. This study uses discriminant analysis, based on selected job attitudes, to generate a function to distinguish between employees who were or were not shareholders in a large financial institution. The discriminant function was then used to classify those employees who had been shareholders but who had subsequently sold their shares. The evidence indicated that those who had sold their shares had similar job attitudes to existing shareholders and dramatically different job attitudes from those who had never purchased shares. Conjectural insights are offered into the original effect of share purchase on job attitudes.     

Unions and Employee Ownership: A Road to Economic Democracy?*

In the relationship between unions and employee share ownership, neither threatened the other, and their combination led to benefits for employees, particularly where unionized employees were majority owners. Companies adding communication, training, and participation reported performance gains. These practices were more common among majority‐owned companies and in companies facing economic threats. Economic performance and benefits were comparable, whether unionized employees owned a majority of the stock, a minority, or none at all.     

The Causal Association Between Employee Share Ownership and Attitudes: a Study Based on the Long Framework

This paper examines the causal association between share ownership and attitudes of New Zealand managers, using Long's (1978a) theoretical framework. The results of the longitudinal study showed that: (1) pre-existing attitudes had no causal effect on the decision to purchase shares; and (2) employee share ownership did not result in the expected improvement in attitudes. Reasons as to why the scheme had little effect are discussed.     

独立董事引入后董事间的冲突变化

本文从我国上市公司特有的股权状况出发，对独立董事引入前后上市公司董事会的冲突差异进行了论述，分析了独立董事的引入可能给新的董事会带来的冲突种类及成因，并提出相关对策。为我国上市公司独立董事引入后如何减少冲突，提高董事会决策效率提供借鉴与参考。     

The Perception and Effects of Share Ownership: Empirical Evidence from Employee Buy-Outs

Forward Links to Citing Articles
Apology British Journal of Industrial Relations 43:4, 751
This paper explores the impact of employee ownership on employee attitudes, using attitudinal data obtained from four UK bus companies which had adopted the ESOP form of employee share ownership. After reviewing the recent UK literature, the paper highlights the findings from US literature that a 'sense of ownership' is an important intervening variable between actual ownership and attitudinal change, and that opportunities for participating in decision-making are more important than ownership per se in generating feelings of ownership. The paper incorporates these possibilities in using a two-stage ordered probit model to explore the relationships between ownership and attitudinal outcomes. The findings support intrinsic and instrumental models of ownership, and indicate that feelings of ownership are significantly associated with higher levels of commitment and satisfaction.     

Employee Ownership and Company Performance

This paper investigates how Britain's largest employee-owned firm, the John Lewis Partnership, performs relative to its major competitors. In the context of John Lewis's unique constitutional structure, employee ownership appears to offer significant advantages in the market place. It is difficult to assess the relative importance of particular policies; as a group, employee ownership, open information flows, high wages, and profit share are clearly associated with high productivity.     

Firm-Level Influences on Forms of Employment and Pay in Russia

This article examines forms of employment and compensation in a sample of 44 Russian enterprises in 1996. The incidence of employee participation in decision making is highest in employee-owned enterprises. Otherwise, ownership has little impact. Effects of industry, size, resources, and transaction costs are consistent with Western experience. The employment relation in contemporary Russian enterprises is thus not so deeply embedded in institutional influences as to be insensitive to conditions prevailing in individual workplaces.     

Employee Participation and Equal Opportunities Practices: Productivity Effect and Potential Complementarities

The relationships between employee participation, equal opportunities practices and productivity are explored. Data from the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey of 1998 provide strong evidence that equal opportunities practices improve productivity overall, and increasingly so as the share of female and ethnic minority employees increases. However, short‐term effects may be negative in segregated workplaces. Non‐financial participation schemes are negatively associated with productivity, but in most cases the joint presence of these participatory schemes and equal opportunities practices significantly increases productivity. Interactions between participatory and equal opportunities schemes are also affected by work‐force composition and by the level of equal opportunities policies implemented.     

Employee Participation,Ownership, and Productivity: A Theoretical Framework

A new conceptual framework to define and differentiate among diverse forms of employee ownership is developed. Two central rights associated with ownership, return and control rights, are identified. Their impact on individual motivation, individual performance, organizational structural variables and organizational performance is evaluated. We show how, over certain ranges of combinations of control and return rights, the relationship between alternative ownership arrangements and organizational performance may be nonlinear. The implications for the introduction of employee ownership and the evaluation of empirical work are considered.     

The Europeanization of organic agriculture and conflicts over agricultural policy

Organic agriculture was Europeanized through two EU regulations which defined and provided financial support for it. In transposing these regulations, member states have had to deal with political aspects of the conflict between mainstream and organic agriculture. A comparison of 13 new (including former socialist states) and old member states illustrates that the level of conflict had an impact only on the level of financial support transposed, while other aspects of transposition were explained by formal institutional preconditions. Low financial support was found in those member states with a high level of conflict or a low value-based level of conflict. Medium financial support was found in one new and one old member state characterized by medium level conflicts. High financial support appeared in three member states characterized by truly low level conflicts in terms of common organic and mainstream agriculture interests.     

Corporate Governance and Performance in Publicly Listed,Family-Controlled Firms: Evidence from Taiwan

Using a multi-industry dataset of 228 firms listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) this paper analyses the effects of ownership structure and board characteristics on performance in large, publicly traded firms that are controlled by founding families. After taking account of possible endogeneity problems, we do not find that family control is associated with performance measured in terms of accounting ratios, sales per issued capital, earnings per share and market-to-book value. However, share ownership by institutional investors, and foreign financial institutions in particular, is associated with better performance. Our results indicate that board independence from founding family and board members’ financial interests have a positive impact on performance.     

Employment Change after Takeovers: The Role of Executive Ownership

The article examines the impact of executive ownership and other ownership and governance factors on employment change after takeovers. Drawing on a dataset of 235 takeovers, the results show that there is a reduction in employment in just over 50 per cent of the sample. Higher levels of executive share ownership are associated with lower probabilities of employee layoffs post‐takeover, and there is a positive relationship between executive ownership and employment growth. The effect of executive options on employment change is generally insignificant, as are the effects of other features of ownership and governance. The evidence suggests that executives with higher levels of ownership tend to mount takeovers of better‐performing firms and to implement takeovers aimed at growth.     

Variable Pay,Industrial Relations and Foreign Ownership: Evidence from Germany

We use a representative sample of German establishments to show that those with foreign ownership are more likely to use performance appraisal, profit‐sharing and employee share ownership than those with domestic ownership. Moreover, we show that works councils are associated with an increased probability of using each of the three practices when under domestic ownership but not when under foreign ownership. These results inform the ongoing debate over institutional duality, the extent to which foreign firms adopt uniform practices independent of local institutions, and the extent to which they adapt and participate in those local institutions.     

Buying into Capitalism? Employee Ownership in a Disconnected Era

This article considers whether employee ownership mitigates the negative workplace outcomes identified by the Disconnected Capitalism Thesis (DCT). Drawing on a programme of in‐depth interviews with workers and managers in employee‐owned businesses (EOBs), the article reveals how they are partially insulated from the vicissitudes endemic within contemporary capitalism. In contrast to the workplace outcomes envisaged within the DCT, these firms are characterized by strong workforce participation, high levels of employment security, active employee engagement and strong levels of employee creativity. Not only are these features beneficial for productivity and firm performance, they generate a form of ‘connected’ capitalism, partially offsetting wider negative systemic forces at play in the economy.     

Why Do Firms Adopt Profit-Sharing and Employee Ownership Plans?

Profit-sharing and employee ownership in companies have attracted considerable interest, yet there has been little research on factors predicting the adoption and maintenance of these plans. This study uses new data from a survey of 500 US public companies, and panel data on corporate financial variables, to examine factors predicting the presence and adoption of profit- sharing and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in the 1975–91 period. Several findings support productivity-related motivations for such plans (including higher R&D levels among old profit-sharing firms, and recent adoption of job enrichment programmes among new profit-sharing firms), while others support flexibility-related motivations (including higher variance in profits prior to the adoption of profit-sharing plans and ESOPs). Unionized firms were less likely to have either type of plan in 1975, but equally likely to adopt them subsequently (often in concessionary contracts). Comparisons of cross-sectional and panel results illustrate advantages of panel data in disentangling the causes and effects of profit-sharing and ESOPs.