Using two new data sets from France, the authors present the first study of the comparative productivity of labor-managed and conventional firms involving large representative samples of firms in a range of industries including services. Their study offers new stylized facts on labor-managed firms, and disentangles incentive effects from those of differences in input demand behavior on factor elasticities. Contrary to received wisdom, labor-managed firms are not smaller than conventional firms; they grow as fast or faster in all industries. The two groups of firms organize production differently. Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms' industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales.

By drawing on new interview evidence gathered during several field trips and new financial and economic data from both external and internal sources, we document and assess the changing economic importance and performance of the Mondragon group of cooperatives as well as the two largest sectors within the group. Compared to conventional firms in the Basque Country and Spain, and producer coops (PCs) and employee owned firms elsewhere, in general we find evidence of growing group importance and strong performance and a similarly strong record for the industrial and retail divisions. These stylized facts do not support hypotheses concerning PCs such as predictions that PCs will restrict employment and become progressively comparatively undercapitalized. In accounting for this record, we highlight key and, at times, not uncontroversial institutional developments in the group during the last 20 years or so that indicate the existence of a continuing capacity for institutional adaptation in Mondragon-an ongoing ability to innovate and make institutional adjustments to deal with emerging challenges. In addition, we provide more detailed information than before on some key distinguishing institutional mechanisms of the Mondragon group, including the extent of worker-member transfers during economic crises, the patterns of profit pooling and the type and volume of training. The aggressive and extensive use of these and related mechanisms, themselves formulated and refined only after a deliberative democratic process, may help to account for some of the outstanding features of the Mondragon group record. Overall these findings represent suggestive evidence that groups of employee-owned firms are feasible and sustainable organizational forms; in a world of declining labor power and tepid employment recovery by private firms, the institutional arrangements at Mondragon are worthy of deeper study by many including policymakers, other coops and other employee-owned firms.

No abstract

El objetivo principal de este trabajo de investigación es conocer las percepciones y expectativas de las personas trabajadoras de una cooperativa del Grupo MONDRAGON sobre la comunicación interna. Se ha puesto especial interés en conocer: por un lado, las percepciones de las personas trabajadoras sobre la información transmitida por la cooperativa; por otro lado, sus percepciones sobre cómo realizan la escucha los directivos y mandos intermedios cuando les trasladan sus preocupaciones y expectativas. Asimismo, con la intención de conocer si existen diferencias, se han analizado las percepciones indicadas teniendo en cuenta las siguientes variables: ser miembro de algún órgano, tipo de mano de obra, situación laboral y sede. Para la realización de este estudio de caso se han combinado la metodología cualitativa y cuantitativa: se ha llevado a cabo una recogida de datos cuantitativos a través de un cuestionario propio y datos cualitativos a través de la realización de entrevistas semiestructuradas. Los resultados de la investigación sugieren que por lo general, aunque las personas trabajadoras de la cooperativa se sienten informadas, tienen la percepción de que se les escucha poco a la hora de trasladar sus preocupaciones y expectativas; al mismo tiempo, encontramos diferencias estadísticas significativas al analizar esos mismos datos por variables.

Over the past two decades, organizational sustainability has been studied from several different perspectives, such as marketing, governance, strategy, and human resource management (HRM). However, sustainability framed in HRM has not yet received enough attention in the literature, especially as it concerns the study of different organizational forms. Building on Enhert and Harry’s (2012) sustainable HRM approach, this article studies worker empowerment and how it affects organizational performance in terms of service quality and service innovation. Specifically, it addresses how relational motivations interact with HR-empowering practices (involvement in decisions and task autonomy) as organizational resources in influencing performance, how workload pressure resulting from HR empowerment can improve performance, and the influence of gender on performance, especially with concerns for human capital (tertiary education) and motivations. To this end, a representative sample of workers employed by Italian social enterprises (ES) in the social service sector is used. We propose multilevel SEMs that are based on two sets of equations specifying worker- and organization-level effects on organizational performance. Our main results show that the combination of worker engagement and an appropriate relational context in the organizational environment is most conducive to delivering better and innovative services. In addition, a higher percentage of well-trained and relationally motivated women employees helps achieve this goal.