ABSTRACT
There has been much recent discussion of the effects of employee involvement, empowerment, participation in decision-making, team work, self-managed groups, profit-sharing, and stock ownership on economic performance. In developed economies, such ‘human resource’ practices are envisioned as organizational innovations that may improve competitiveness in the global market. In the emerging market economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, these issues are prominent due to the drastic reorganization of firms after the fall of the communist regimes. This paper is aimed to inform these discussions by offering a theoretical perspective on the productivity effects of various ‘human resource’ practices, which we regard as manifestations of different degrees of employee ownership, and by reviewing the empirical literature that bears on it.
