Adoption of Employee Involvement Practices: Organizational Change Issues and Insights

Employee involvement (EI) is a major part of high-performance work systems (HPWS) that have successfully transformed a large number of organizations and have become standard practice in many new organizations. Despite the proven benefits of EI, however, it is still not as widely utilized as it could be even when accounting for industry and organization differences in its applicability. We suggest that EI implementation is limited in part by the change management challenges it presents. We review the recent research on EI and HPWS, and suggest ways in which change research and theory can inform our understanding of why EI practices have fallen short of their potential and how they can be effectively implemented.