The Impact of Financial Participation and Employee Involvement on Financial Performance: a Re-estimation Using the 1998 Wers

This note re-iterates McNabb and Whitfield's (1998) empirical investigation of the relationship between workplace performance and various indicators of employee involvement. McNabb and Whitfield used the 1990 WIRS, whereas our re-estimation is for the 1998 WERS. Our results differ sharply from theirs; in particular, we discern no significant association between downward communication and firm performance, nor do we find that employee share ownership and profit related pay are substitutes. More generally, our findings underscore the difficulty of specifying the relationship between firm performance and employee involvement that is amply reflected in the diversity of findings in the wider literature.