High Commitment Management in the U.K.: Evidence from the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, and Employers' Manpower and Skills Practices Survey

Abstract

Are the practices widely associated with the high commitment or involvement model, such as job flexibility and minimal status differences, actually used in conjunction with each other? Or rather are they being used, as some commentators speculate, in a fragmented or ad hoc manner? The authors use Latent Variable Analysis to assess whether practices identified with high commitment management do form a unity. They are simultaneously attempting to see if such practices can be used as indicators for measuring an underlying high commitment orientation on the part of management. The analysis uses data from the 1990 UK Workplace Industrial Relations Survey and its sister survey, the Employers' Manpower and Skills Practices Survey, on the use of a range of high commitment practices across the whole economy. The evidence suggests that there is an identifiable pattern to the use of high commitment practices. Four progressive styles of high commitment management (HCM) were discovered. Though the use of it in its entirety is still relatively rare in the UK, the proportion of organizations with medium levels of high commitment management is higher than is perhaps commonly assumed. High degrees of high commitment management are not necessarily associated with nonunion workplaces. The research also demonstrates that HCM does have some performance effects, though they are not unique to it since those organizations that adopt high commitment management in its entirety do not perform better on any performance criteria than all others, but they do perform better than some types.