Too Smart to Participate? Rational Reasons for Employees’ Non-participation in Action Research

Abstract

Action research literature promotes broad participation in order to gain better insights into prevailing issues and cope with both present and future challenges in organizations. For good reasons, action researchers view participation as desirable and even necessary. However, emphasizing participation also creates a blind spot: researchers tend to assume that employees are willing or even eager to take part in organizational change projects. A group of action researchers involved in a large-scale organizational development project in a Norwegian public organization initially also had this optimistic assumption. Over time, they realized that many employees were reluctant to participate and often kept silent, so they conducted follow-up research to explore the reasons for employees’ non-participation. The findings show that the employees had rational reasons not to participate, and that employee participation should not be taken for granted. The paper outlines eight different rationales for non-participation, and discusses implications for action research.

Work stress, mental health, and employee performance

“…Finally, another view suggests that no relationship exists between them (Tănăsescu and Ramona-Diana, 2019 ). Indubitably, it presupposes that employees are rational beings (Lebesby and Benders, 2020 ). Per this view, work stress cannot motivate employees or influence their psychology and thus cannot impact their performance.…”

Co-creating New Dancefloors Through a Parallel Organisation

“…Ultimately, ensuring the direct participation of all employees is more demanding on resources and time, which was also the experience in this AR project, as local pilot projects were carried out as an additional part of the project. Rational reasons for why employees did not participate actively in the AR project were studied in a previous paper (Lebesby & Benders, 2020)).…”

The criticism of action research in administration as a way of rescue of its potential for the contextualized action

“…In this process, no change may occur, or it might not happen as planned; even so, its active feature is the basic assumption of this type of research (Macke, 2010). Furthermore, the produced knowledge is expected to be used in the daily lives of the participants (Lebesby & Benders, 2020).…”

“…Santos, Calíope and Barros (2017) analyzed fifty-four articles that used action research and found similar results by identifying that in most cases there was no involvement between researchers and research participants. Lebesby and Benders (2020) aimed to explore the reasons why employees do not become involved in the intervention process and in the proposed changes. Amongst the identified reasons, employees reported a feeling of false autonomy.…”