Study of a quality of work life program: Organizational control, experience, influence, and objective involvement

The implications of being involved in either the design of changes or the applica-tion of a QWL change for four aspects of experienced influence are considered. The results indicate that while organization-wide experiences and perceptions of increased influence occurred, the people who experienced the most increase in influence were those who helped design the change. Participative union/management change programs have been recom-mended to improve employees ’ quality of work life both by bringing about programmatic changes and by promoting the experience of personal influence. The present article considers the difference in consequences for experienced influence of participating in making organizational changes versus being one of the people especially affected by changes designed by union/management collaborative committees. The article also considers the question of which of the many influence-related variables currently being studied in the organizational behavior literature are likely to be affected by employee involvement in such programs. (For complete descriptions and evaluations of the specific programmatic and structural changes resulting from the change effort, see Macy & Nurick, in press). The issue of whether participation per se or the programmatic products of some participative interventions explain the positive atti-tudinal consequences of many organization development efforts con-tinues to be controversial. This controversy is expressed, for example, in a series of articles describing (Neider, 1980), evaluating (Locke, 1980