Breitling Kai, Scholl Wolfgang
Department of Social Security Administration, Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences, Berlin, Germany.
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Life Sciences, Institute for Psychology, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2022 Apr 8;13:795143. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.795143. eCollection 2022.
Successful innovations are deemed to be necessary requisites for enterprise success. On the other hand, works council participation ("co-determination" in Germany) and employee participation are judged differently as either fostering employee and enterprise benefits or only the former or even none. Both forms of participation have found diverging theoretical and empirical argumentations regarding innovations. Here, we argue and show empirically that both forms of participation deliver positive contributions to innovation success, economically and employee-related, substantiated with qualitative reports from 36 process innovation cases and quantitative data from 44 cases. Qualitative case analyses reveal different profiles of works council participation depending on the innovation type. Independent of the innovation types, more successful innovations are marked by more intensive participation. Quantitative examinations of a causal model with path analysis specify how this is achieved: works council and employee participation further the growth of appropriate knowledge and the former also raises the coordination capability; both are essential preconditions for innovation success. A direct impact of works councils on innovation success complements the indirect effects. The slightly modified path analysis explains 53% of the innovation success variance.
成功的创新被视为企业成功的必要条件。另一方面，工作委员会的参与（在德国称为“共同决定”）和员工参与的评价则有所不同，有人认为它们能促进员工和企业的利益，有人认为只能促进前者，甚至有人认为两者都不能促进。关于创新，这两种参与形式在理论和实证方面都存在不同的观点。在此，我们通过论证并实证表明，这两种参与形式在经济和员工相关方面都对创新成功做出了积极贡献，这一结论得到了来自36个流程创新案例的定性报告和44个案例的定量数据的支持。定性案例分析揭示了工作委员会参与因创新类型而异的不同特征。无论创新类型如何，更成功的创新都具有更深入的参与特征。通过路径分析对因果模型进行的定量检验明确了实现这一目标的方式：工作委员会和员工参与促进了适当知识的增长，工作委员会还提高了协调能力；这两者都是创新成功的重要前提条件。工作委员会对创新成功的直接影响补充了间接影响。经过略微修改的路径分析解释了创新成功差异的53%。
