High Involvement Management

Conceptual Overview

High involvement management is, for Lawler, distinctive precisely because it includes organization-level empowerment and goes beyond a narrow concept of job redesign; it includes the organizational changes that are designed to support the job-level involvement. These include changes in supervisory roles and systems and in the allocation and determination of rewards. Without such organizational redesigns, job involvement may well fail, for example, if supervisors unilaterally usurp the decision-making authority that employees may have been given.

The underlying concept is that if workers are to be strongly involved in their organization and to care enthusiastically about its performance, then they need to be able to influence decisions. To do this effectively, workers also need to know about the goals and strategy of the organization, have the knowledge and skills to contribute to those goals, and be rewarded for using their skills to promote them. Consequently, Lawler's high involvement management model has four dimensions, respectively termed power, information sharing, developing knowledge, and rewarding performance. The power dimension is the fulcrum; it ensures that power is distributed to lower levels of the organization so that operational decisions are decentralized and employees have genuine opportunities to make suggestions and participate in strategic decisionmaking processes. The other three dimensions ensure that individuals have the right information, skills, and rewards to use their power in ways that contribute significantly to the organization's goals. Thus, high involvement management involves practices such as sharing information on quality, customer feedback and business results, organizational performance-related reward systems, and extensive training and development, the social and problem-solving skills required for high involvement working included.

In a similar vein, Richard Walton identified a high commitment approach to management centered on work enrichment, functional flexibility, and teamwork, and included the same range of supporting practices as those suggested by Lawler. Equally, employee involvement has figured prominently in more popular management writing, such as in Jeffrey Pfeffer's 16 best management practices. Indeed, high involvement management has been advocated as the approach most appropriate for the increasingly uncertain and competitive economy that many anticipate; the message of Lawler and Walton in the 1980s was that it was universally relevant and need not be confined to technologically advanced industries. Whether this was because it had superseded the control model as the best model for even stable situations, or that most organizations now faced an unstable environment, was not entirely clear. But the implication is that organizations that adopt it ought to perform better than those that do not.

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