High Involvement Management and Wellbeing

Although there appears to be a link between firms' use of high involvement management (HIM) practices, such as team-working and financial incentives, less is known about their effects on worker subjective wellbeing. Together with colleagues at the Labour Institute for Economic Research and the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy, both in Helsinki, we will examine this issue for Finnish workers. The study follows on from earlier research* we undertook which indicated quite complicated relationships between various forms of HIM and short-term and longer-term absence taking.

Methods

The study will use longitudinal data for Finnish workers linking administrative data on their work histories to their responses to the MEADOW survey data.**  We will conduct multivariate analyses isolating the relationship between HIM and worker wellbeing having conditioned on factors influencing exposure to HIM practices, including potentially confounding indicators of prior wellbeing.

Timescale and funder

The study is jointly funded by the Labour Institute for Economic Research and the Research Institute of the Finnish Economy.  It begins in April 2015 and ends in December 2016.

Outputs

We envisage a single academic journal article together with a blog summarising our empirical findings and their implications.