Employee Involvement

Employee Involvement
[Name of the Writer]
[Name of the Institution]

Employee Involvement
Introduction
Employee involvement plays quite a vital role in the development of an organization. Moreover, it also facilitates better alignment of company’s aims and objectives. However, there are some contingencies also involved with it.
Benefits of Employee Involvement
There are a number of benefits related to employee involvement in the decision making process. However, the direct advantages include enhancement of productivity, improvement of morale, savings, and teamwork.
Whenever the employees are put into the decision making process, they have quite a sense of responsibility for achieving company’s success. It also results in higher productivity because of active participation of workers and employees in different decision-making processes. Moreover, it allows them to enhance their skill-set thereby allowing them to be prepared for future responsibilities.
Engagement in the decision-making process boosts the overall morale of the company. Most of the companies quite commonly have quite a demarcating power difference between workers and management tiers. On the other hand, the active involvement of employee on decision-making process helps the company to lower this gap and thereby opening formal channels of communication at every level within an organization.
Outsourcing the decision-making process is quite costly and is not that much beneficial for the company. However, allowing employees for their inputs and feedbacks on different decision saves a substantial amount of money.

When the employees are making decisions, they become familiarized with teamwork, and it allows the company to have a strong bond at every level in company from the top management to front-line workers (Anderson, 2015).
Contingencies of Employee Involvement
Involvement of employees depends on the nature of the situation, at hand. Hence, there is a total of four contingencies related to employee involvement. It includes the source of decision-related knowledge, decision structure, the risk of having conflict and commitment of decision (Freeman and Kleiner, 2000).
There are a number of decisions that are termed as programmed decisions. They do not require inputs from the employees. The most vital example of it involves the arise of a similar issue in the past. Another contingency includes the decision-making knowledge. In some industrial settings, workers and employees have more knowledge related to making the decision as compared to management. Most commonly, these industrial settings have closer ties of employees with production activities and customers’ needs. Decision commitment is another aspect and is quite common because, in some cases, the employees do not feel comfortable with decisions and hence, should be involved up to some level in the decision-making process. The risk of conflicts is another important issues, and it undermines the fruits of employee involvement in two basic ways. First one includes, that the employees have contradictory norms and goals to that of company’s and the second one includes the degree of employees to reach a consensus on the decision (McShane and Von Glinow, 2007).
Real-life Scenario
As part of my previous experience, I have worked for one year at a plastic films manufacturing company at junior level management position. During the first shutdown, the company has been faced with a severe crisis because a specific raw material has become unavailable in the market. The top management has invited everyone from production, quality, marketing, finance and research and development department for finding the best solution for it. Different alternatives were proposed, and the company has reached the decision on purchasing small quantities for specific testing of its compliance with product quality. The management does not know much about it would behave, and this is first time, I was faced with knowledge source contingency; however, it was resolved after some testing.
Conclusion
All in all, employee involvement plays quite a key role in making the organization to flourish by motivating employees to work in the best interest of the company. References
Anderson, C. (2015). The Advantages of Employee Involvement in Decision Making. Small Business – Chron.com. Retrieved 27 April 2015, from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-employee-involvement-decision-making-18264.html
Freeman, R. B., & Kleiner, M. M. (2000). Who benefits most from employee involvement: firms or workers?. American Economic Review, 90(2), 219-223.
McShane, S., & Von Glinow, M. (2007). Organizational behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill.