Editorial: Employee Participation and Organizational Culture. Zeitschrift für Personalforschung

Employee participation has become a convenient catch-all term to cover a variety of forms and organizational techniques. For instance, it encompasses such diverse forms as participative management, workplace democracy, representative participation, em-powerment, quality circles, and employee ownership. Although each of these concepts have unique characteristics, they all have as a common core the idea that by allowing employees to participate in decisions that affect them and by increasing their auton-omy and control over their work lives, they will become more motivated, more com-mitted to the organization, and more satisfied with their jobs (Wagner 2004; Antoni 2007). To start with, employee participation can be divided into material and immaterial forms. Material participation includes all forms of financial (monetary) participation of employees in the company such as a participation in the organizations ’ capital, profit or gain or other forms, e.g. stock options (Backes-Gellner/Kay/Schröer/Wolf 2002). Immaterial participation has employees involved in information, coordination, and decision processes within the company. Here, one has to distinguish between forms o