Today's managers are experimenting with a number of applications in order to increase their employees' motivation.

Today's managers are experimenting with a number of applications in order to increase their employees' motivation. We conclude our discussion of motivation and rewards by briefly reviewing the more popular of these applications.

Employee Involvement

Employee involvement has become a convenient catchall term to cover a variety of techniques. For instance, it encompasses such popular ideas as employee participation or participative management, empowerment, workplace democracy, and employee ownership. We define employee involvement as a participative process that uses the entire capacity of employees and is designed to encourage increased commitment to the organization's success. The underlying logic is that by involving workers in those decisions that affect them and by increasing their autonomy and control over their work lives, employees will become more motivated, more committed to the organization, more productive, and more satisfied with their jobs. Exhibit 13-8 describes four forms of employee involvement.

(iermany, France. Holland, and the Scandinavian countries have firmly established the principle of industrial democracy in Europe, and other nations, including Japan and Israel, have traditionally practiced some form of representative participation for decades. Participative management and representative participation were much slower to gain ground in North American organizations. But nowadays employee- involvement programs that stress participation have become the norm. Quality circles were very popular in the 1980s. Many have since been replaced by more-comprehensive