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Definition/Overview
Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal) to the workplace.

Workplace Democracy is implemented in a variety of ways, dependent on the size, culture, and other variables of an organization. Workplace Democracy can be anything from direct democracy to employers asking opinions of employees without taking into consideration their beliefs and opinions.

Advantages/Arguments for
Economic Argument

From as early as the 1920s, scholars have been exploring the idea of increasing employee participation and involvement. They sought to learn if whether including employees in organizational decision-making would lead to increased effectiveness and productivity within the organization. According to Lewin, individuals who are involved in decision-making also have increased openness to change Different participative techniques can have either a stronger impact on moral than productivity, while others have the reverse effect. Success of the employee-owned and operated, Mondragon, suggests economic benefits from workplace democracy.

Citizenship Argument

Workplace democracy acts as an agent to encourage public participation in a government's political process. Skills developed from democracy in the workplace can transfer to improved citizenship and result in a better functioning democracy. Workers in a democratic environment may also develop a greater concern from the common good, which also transfers to fundamental citizenship.

Ethical Justification

Making workplaces more democratic is the "right" thing to do. Philosopher, Robert Dahl, claims that 'if democracy is justified in governing the state, it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises'.

Employee Power and Representation

When workplace democracy is used the effect typically is raised employee potential, employee representation, higher autonomy, and equal power within an organization (Rolfsen, 2011).

Disadvantages/Arguments against
Ethical Argument

Owners of the enterprise have more stock and risk in the company, therefore owners should not have to involve employees in decision-making. Employees willingly enter into an employment contract, which they trade their labor for money and have the right to retire their labor at any time.

Associated with ideologies
These methods are often seen as associated with trade unions (or more lately eco-socialism). Most unions have democratic structures at least for selecting the leader, and sometimes these are seen as providing the only democratic aspects of work. However, unions are not everywhere, and not every workplace that lacks a union lacks democracy, and not every workplace that has a union necessarily has a democratic way to resolve disputes

However, some unions have historically been more committed to it than others. The Industrial Workers of the World pioneered the archetypal workplace democracy model, the Wobbly Shop, in which recallable delegates were elected by workers, and other norms of grassroots democracy were applied. This is still used in some organizations, notably Semco and in the software industry.

The best known and most studied example of a successfully democratic national labor union in the United States are the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, known throughout the labor movement as the UE. An independent trade Union, the UE was built from the bottom-up, and takes pride in its motto that "The Members Run This Union!" .

Studies by management science
Industrial and organizational psychology and even more formal management science has studied the methods of workplace democracy. They are just that—methods—and do not imply any particular political movement, agenda, theory, or ideology: There are many management science papers on the application of democratic structuring, in particular, to the workplace, and the benefits of it. One such international study of more than 50 different democratic companies discovered that a minimum of six specific organizational components (including political, economic, psychological and juridical processes) were all equally necessary if the democratic functioning of management systems was to last over the long term.

Benefits often are contrasted to simple command hierarchy arrangements in which "the boss" can hire anyone and fire anyone, and takes absolute and total responsibility for his own well-being and also all that occurs "under" him. The command hierarchy is a preferred management style followed in many companies for its simplicity, speed and low process overheads.

Relation to political theory
However, workplace democracy theory closely follows political democracy, especially where businesses are large or politics is small:

Spanish anarchists, Mohandas Gandhi's Swadeshi movement, farm and retail co-operative movements, all made contributions to the theory and practice of workplace democracy and often carried that into the political arena as a "more participatory democracy." The Green Parties worldwide adopted this as one of their Four Pillars and also often mimic workplace democracy norms such as gender equity, co-leadership, deliberative democracy applied to any major decision, and leaders who don't do policy. The Democratic Socialist Parties have always supported the notion of workplace democracy and democratically controlled institutions.

In Sweden, the Social democratic Party made laws and reforms from 1950-70 to achieve more democratic workplaces. Giving the unions a right to balance the management and have some influential power was rather radical at that time.

Politically, Salvador Allende inspired a large number of such experiments in Chile before his assassination on September 11, 1973. The book Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer details experiments in workplace feedback that exploited systems theory extensively.

Current approaches
Limits of management Many organizations began by the 1960s to realize that tight control by too few people was creating groupthink, turnover in staff and a loss of morale among qualified people helpless to appeal what they saw as misguided, uninformed, or poorly thought out decisions. Often employees who publicly criticize such poor decision making of their higher management are penalized or even fired from their jobs on some false pretext or other. The comic strip Dilbert has become popular satirizing this type of oblivious management, the icon for which is the Pointy Haired Boss, a nameless and clueless social climber. The Dilbert principle has been accepted as fact by some.

Much management philosophy has focused on trying to limit manager power, differentiate leadership versus management, and so on. Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker and Donella Meadows were three very notable theorists addressing these concerns in the 1980s. Mintzberg and Drucker studied how executives spent their time, Meadows how change and leverage to resist it existed at all levels in all kinds of organizations.

Adhocracy, functional leadership models, and reengineering were all attempts to detect and remove administrative incompetence. Business process and quality management methods in general remove managerial flexibility that is often perceived as masking managerial mistakes, but also preventing transparency and facilitating fraud, as in the case of Enron. Had managers been more accountable to employees, it is argued, owners and employees would not have been defrauded.

Mondragon
The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation is the largest worker cooperative in the world, and as such the largest corporation that operates some form of workplace democracy. The Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff states it is "a stunningly successful alternative to the capitalist organization of production".

Marland Mold
Marland Mold was a company started in 1946 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, by Severino Marchetto and Paul Ferland. The company at first, designed and built steel molds for plastic products throughout the 1950's and 60's. In 1969 the owners sold the company to VCA which was later bought by The Ethyl Corporation. The Marland Mold employees voted to join a International Union of Electrical Workers, becasue of a dispute that took place over health insurance. The plants manager started to pay less attention and put less time into the Pittsfield plant so the profits declined. The plant was put up for sale in 1992. The employees ended up buying out the plant, even though they weren't fans of employee ownership before they needed to save their jobs. There immediately was a burst in production and they were able to produce molds that normally took the 3000 hours to make in 2200 hours. They had financial stake in the company now which gave them new motivation for the companies success. The other two ideas that were key components to their success was the education of all members about their new roles, and building an ownership culture within the organization. In 1995, they had officially bought all ownership stock and buyout lenders and the company was completely employee owned. Through all of this employees were also able to gain a broader perspective on the company, like being able to understand others views of different conflicts in the workplace. In 2007, Marland Mold celebrated their 15th anniversary of employee ownership.

Influenced matrix management
Managerial grid models and matrix management, compromises between true workplace democracy and conventional top-down hierarchy, became common in the 1990s. These models cross responsibilities so that no one manager had total control of any one employee, or so that technical and marketing management were not subordinated to each other but had to argue out their concerns more mutually. A consequence of this was the rise of learning organization theory, in which the ontology of definitions in common among all factions or professions becomes the main management problem.

London Business School chief, Nigel Nicholson, in his 1998 Harvard Business Review paper: "How Hardwired is Human Behavior?" suggested that human nature was just as likely to cause problems in the workplace as in larger social and political settings, and that similar methods were required to deal with stressful situations and difficult problems. He held up the workplace democracy model advanced by Ricardo Semler as the "only" one that actually took cognizance of human foibles.

Semler and Semco
Ricardo Semler, in his own book Maverick, explained how he took his family firm in Brazil, a light manufacturing concern called Semco, and transformed it into a strictly democratic firm where managers were interviewed and then elected by workers, where all decisions were subject to democratic review, debate and vote, and where every worker was expected to justify themselves to their peers. This radical approach to total quality management got him and the company a great deal of attention. Semler argued that handing the company over to the workers was the only way to free time for himself to go build up the customer, government and other relationships required to make the company grow. By literally giving up the fight to hold any control of internals, Semler was able to focus on marketing, positioning, and offer his advice (as a paid, elected spokesman, though his position as major shareholder was not so negotiable) as if he were, effectively, an outside management consultant. Decentralization of management functions, he claimed, gave him a combination of insider information and outsider credibility, plus the legitimacy of truly speaking for his workers in the same sense as an elected political leader.

The book ends with twenty pages of cartoons that constitute Semco's only employee manual. They explain such things as the company's attitudes to women and their advancement, managers and their role, sales and operations, technology, and read somewhat like the rationale of a nonprofit or political party.

Nicholson's analysis was more academic and conventional and focused on many other detailed problems of human behaviour and dispute resolution, which he claimed Semler had resolved.

Managers and Workers Attitudes
Workplace Democracy is primarily an issue of class. These different classes have opposing interests, but similar attitudinal preferences. There are four different configurations: Pro-labor and Pro-business (corporatists), Pro-labor and Anti-business (leftists), Anti-labor and Pro-business (conservatives), and Anti-labor and Anti-business (populists).

Conservatives are described to be the least supportive of workplace democracy. Corporatists are described to have moderate support, may see too much democracy as threatening management. Populists and Leftists are the most supportive out of all configurations. As participation resonates with populists and leftists are to be pro-worker.

12 Items that tap into attitudes toward workplace democracy.

Independent Variables, Class Location, Class Orientation, Dominant Ideology, Pay Equity, Union Membership, Strike Experience, Current Worker Influence, Control Variables, Age, Women, Minority, Income.

Leadership Styles
Workplace Democracy is a form of democratic leadership. Democratic leadership styles can relate back to Theory Y leadership style. Democratic leaders believe and treat subordinates as capable of decision making and work with them on decisions. Workers below democratic leaders report positive results such as group member satisfaction, friendliness, group mindedness, 'we' statements, worker motivation, creativity, and dedication to decisions made within an organization. Negative results include higher time commitments and lower efficiency.