In recent years, considerable attention has been given to the impact of various forms of financial participation on financial performance. However, financial participation is only one of a number of different schemes attempting to elicit better performance and is itself heterogeneous. Moreover, financial participation schemes are typically introduced in conjunction with employee involvement schemes and their combined effect can be very different from their individual contributions. Indeed, concentrating on only one type of participation can seriously distort its relationship with financial performance. In this paper, a range of different employee participation schemes is examined, including two types of financial participation. The results indicate that financial participation has important interaction effects with particular types of employee involvement scheme and that the two main types of financial participation scheme have negative interactions. Furthermore, some employee involvement schemes are found to have a lower or even negative relationship with financial performance when introduced in isolation.

I would like to thank participants at a Cardiff Employment Research Unit seminar, Alan Felstead, Stephen Frenkel, Francis Green, Howard Gospel, Paul Marginson, Ken Mayhew, Stephen Wood, and three anonymous referees of this journal for extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article and Marco Pani for excellent research assistance.1 Use of the generic term high-performance work system and its variants in this article is meant to convey an intention by employers to attain competitive advantage by using work practices based on high involvement, flexible assignment, and/or enhanced teamworking. It does not presuppose that this necessarily generates high levels of performance.

Using matched employer-employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, it is suggested that the presence of employee share ownership at a workplace is not significantly associated with employee commitment to the organization. There is evidence of a significant negative relationship between share ownership and workplace turnover, which explains part of the positive share ownership/performance relationship. This calls into question the postulate that share ownership has its main impact upon performance via the closer alignment of employees' and employers' values and interests -the golden path -rather than the lowering of employee turnover -the golden handcuffs.

An analysis using British matched employer-employee data finds that workers in establishments operating employee participation schemes feel that they have greater influence over their jobs. Schemes involving broader forms of participation, such as representative participation and briefing groups, are shown to be more strongly associated with greater influence than those of a more focused type, such as quality circles and work teams. There is little evidence of a strong positive interaction between these types of schemes.

There has been increased interest in recent years about the way in which employment is organized. Some commentators have suggested that there has been a qualitative transformation such that new forms of work organization have developed which offer the prospect of improved performance. Among the key propositions are: (1) labour is being deployed in a more flexible manner; (2) productivity increasingly depends on the commitment offered by workers; (3) performance-oriented work practices only work if introduced in an internally consistent manner; and (4), it is crucial that such practices are congruent with the overall strategy of the organization in which they are sited. Empirical evidence has indicated that there is much support for these propositions, but that the link between them and high organizational performance is both complex and variable. In particular, the context in which they are situated is a crucial determinant of their success.

Purpose-A range of studies have shown that performance is typically higher in organisations with employee share ownership (ESO) schemes in place. Many possible causal mechanisms explaining this relationship have been suggested. These include a reduction in labour turnover, synergies with other forms of productivity-enhancing communication and participation schemes, and synergies with employer-provided training. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An analysis of leading industrial relations journals suggests that there have been substantial changes in IR research, particularly a shift from inductive, qualitative and policy-oriented research to deductive, quantitative and discipline-oriented research. This is seen to reflect a change in the pressures under which IR research is conducted and the increased availability of computer technology and extensive IR data sets. Important differences remain in research methodology among countries, with US-based journals being the most quantitative and deductive. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2000.

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