Employee participation and trade unions - InterContinental Hotels Group - Essay Example

to the improvement of organizational performance. The various aspects of employee participation are examined in this paper; reference is also made to trade unions, as related to employee participation. The use of these schemes for improving the HR strategies in InterContinental Hotels Group is critically discussed. 2. Employee Participation – description, benefits 2.1. Employee participation – definition The development of employees within modern organization is achieved through a series of HR strategies.

Employee participation is a framework of activities which can lead to the increase of employee satisfaction, thus to the increase of their performance. Different approaches have been used for describing employee participation. In accordance with Hyman et al. (1995) employee participation aims to improve the ‘physical, security and aspirational conditions under which employees are contracted to serve’ (Hyman et al. 1995). These conditions are not analytically explained; it is assumed that reference is made to the workplace environment in all its aspects, including the incentives given to employees for increasing their performance. . 2.

2 Value of employee participation – reasons Employee participation is of significant importance, being related to the improvement of conditions in the workplace. In any case, it is required that employer takes into consideration the views of employees when developing critical business decisions (Rose 2008). From this point of view, i.e. because of the benefits resulted for the employees – as described below – employee participation is considered as being of high value for employees of all organizations.

At this point the following issue needs to be highlighted: the value of employee participation cannot be standardized across organizations, mostly because of the following issues: in certain organizations employee are given the power to intervene in all important business decisions; in others, the power of employee to intervene in the decision making process is quite low, or even non existent – meaning the organizations where employee participation refers to benefits of non-importance, such as the development of meetings or the arrangement of initiatives on the organization’s involvement in environmental issues.

The differentiation in the value of employee participation in organizations is reflected in the model of Blyton and Turnbull (1998), which describes the levels of employee participation. This model is presented in Graph 1, below. No involvement Receiving Joint Joint Employee information consultation decision- control making Graph 1 – Employee participation model (Blyton and Turnbull 1998 in Rose 2008, p.339) 2.3 Benefits of employee participation The promotion of employee participation within the organization, if developed at a satisfactory level – see