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Participation and the Scanlon Plan |
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Participation and the Scanlon Plan
"If you really want to partner with your employees ... one such model is the Scanlon Plan and it is one of the best kept organizational secrets for successful employee involvement, through equity and responsibility sharing."
Ray Dupont
The Art Of Partnering
"Participation and Consultative Management...I need only mention the Scanlon Plan as the outstanding embodiment of these ideas in practice."
"Management by integration and self-control (their) can take many forms. One of the most unusual of these is the Scanlon Plan. Out of his deep interest in union-management cooperation, the late Joseph Scanlon evolved a collaborative strategy which has achieved solid results, in both economic and human terms, in a number of industrial companies."
"Scanlon...represents a social intervention of considerable significance."
Dr. Douglas McGregor
Human Side of Enterprise
"Curiously, the principle of group decision making has had few full fledged applications. Various bastardized "participation plans" do exist. Often they attempt to get without giving and must take their place in the storehouse of gimmicks that might or (might not) work in the short run and are likely to fail in the longer run. The Scanlon Plan, in contrast, attempts to exploit the possibilities of participation AND distribute the benefits among all. It does not pussyfoot."
"The characteristics of programs based upon the Scanlon Plan may be outlined briefly. Basically, the Plan's purpose is to heighten cooperation between labor and management, to sustain it by mutual participation in decision-making, and to nourish it by mutual sharing of the fruits of that cooperation. The underlying assumption may be phrased in such terms: there is a wealth of imagination and inventiveness in most organizations that remains untapped (if not turned against the organization) when the individual has inadequate incentive to make suggestions and appropriate adaptations on his own."
Robert T. Golembiewski
Men, Management, and Morality
"Scanlon... boldest attempt at employee participation in the United States. Its leadership model approaches the democratic values held by non-industry institutions."
Katz and Kahn, 1966
Scanlon Contribution to Employee Involvement/Participation
Participation is the second of the four fundamental Scanlon Principles. Scanlon organizations pioneered employee involvement in North America. Scanlon companies were the first organizations to develop suggestions systems, team-based systems and labor/management committees. Scanlon gainsharing systems continue to be participatively designed by the employees who are impacted by the system.
The Scanlon Leadership Network was confounded by the Donnelly Corporation, widely considered one of the most democratic business organizations. (Donnelly was featured in the Harvard Business Review article "Participative Management at Work" no. 77104.)
Participation Research:
Daniel Dennison of the University of Michigan found that organizations with employee involvement have a 3 times greater return of investment than do traditionally managed organizations.
Numerous surveys indicate employees wish to be able to influence decisions at work.
A study from the Association of Quality and Participation found higher satisfaction in companies with involvement programs and higher involvement was correlated with better performance on a wide range of performance measures..
The Manufacturer's Alliance and the Wyatt Company found high involvement organizations had "significant improvements in the overall quality of products and services."
Sears found that involvement was correlated with employee attitude. Attitude was found to impact customer impression and profitability.
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