Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

94 Employee Participation in Enterprise Control and Returns
On its own, employee participation in enterprise returns is believed,
by Ben-Ner and Jones, to have an uncertain impact on labour productivity.
Employees are exposed only fractionally to the consequences of
increasing or decreasing their own work effort; the increase in income
uncertainty might bring risk-averse employees below the efficiency
wage; 1 managers might be induced to neglect control in presence of
employee participation in returns. In their view, these negative effects
might reduce or even more than offset the direct positive impact of
participation in returns.
Employee participation in control, again on its own, is believed by
Ben-Ner and Jones likely to have a small positive effect when it affects
employees’ immediate work environment, with an otherwise uncertain
impact for power sharing, and a negative impact when employees’
voices become dominant.
The combination and interaction of both forms of participation,
however, is believed to produce productivity effects which exceed the
sum of the separate effects and may even be of the opposite sign.
In particular, with the parallel rise of participation in returns, dominant
employee participation in control reverses its effects from negative to
positive, indeed to highly positive, in what turns out to be a superior
organizational alternative: ‘On balance, we expect that the organizational
productivity of employee-owned firms will exceed that of firms
with other ownership arrangements’ (Ben-Ner and Jones, 1995: 547).
Before we reach this peak, along the diagonal in Table 6.1 the commensurate
rise of both control and return rights is presumed to have positive
though less strong effects, although the complex balance of individual
and organizational productivity effects may cause the relationship
between participation and productivity to be non-monotonic (this is
what Ben-Ner and Jones mean though they call it non-linear instead).
Using zero, () and () for small positive and negative effects, up to
,, and down to , the productivity impact of the participation
schemes outlined in Table 6.1 according to Ben-Ner and Jones
can be summarized thus:
0 () or
or
or or
or
If this were the case, Ben-Ner and Jones would have provided, without
realizing it, an exceedingly strong case for treating employee