Abstract
Democratic management, a unique union-based form of employee participation in China, is seldom studied in the employee participation literature. This paper investigates the associations between employees’ perceived democratic management effectiveness, employee job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), using 988 matching surveys of both workers and their supervisors in a state-owned petrochemical firm from the central region of China. We find that our measure of an employee’s perception of democratic management effectiveness is positively associated with an employee’s job performance and organizational citizenship behavior. However, the association between perceived democratic management effectiveness and employee performance is negative if the employee is a dispatch worker. Our interpretation of the findings suggests that an employee’s perception of democratic management effectiveness is a source of employee performance.
Highlights
Democratic management is a union-based employee participation institution unique to China
We evaluate the effectiveness of democratic management as perceived by employees against two metrics: Employee job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), as assessed by their direct supervisor
Perceived democratic management effectiveness is positively associated with employee job performance (r = 0.22, p < 0.001) and organizational citizenship behaviors (r = 0.31, p < 0.001)
Summary
Democratic management is a union-based employee participation institution unique to China. The “iron rice bowl” (Kuruvilla et al, 2011), or lifetime employment, is no longer guaranteed and the idea of pure economic exchange relations with the firm is growing in SOEs. To maintain the “sense of possession” in SOE employees, democratic management could be used to strengthen the power and control of employees by valuing their say on important workplace issues, including lay-off decisions, evaluations of supervisors and the management, and approval of firm strategy and investment plans through the workers’ congress. Data To examine the effects of perceived democratic management on employee job performance and OCB, we used quantitative survey data from 31 workshops in 6 plants in a state-owned petroleum company located in central China.
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