Worker Performance and Voluntary Turnover in Worker Cooperatives

The management, economics, sociology, and psychology literatures describe a multitude of avenues through which organizations attempt to succeed. One of the most traveled of these is the management of human capital, which usually involves attempts to optimize the return on investments in the workforce. These returns are frequently examined in terms of employee job performance and voluntary turnover. Despite voluminous research on how best to facilitate employee performance and to limit turnover, it is unclear how conventional wisdom regarding these crucial behaviors applies when the fundamental nature of the employer-employee relationship is markedly altered. The worker cooperative (WC) provides a particularly salient and substantially understudied example of such an alternative relationship. Distinctly different from organizations that are not cooperatives (referred to hereafter as NWC's), WC's are democratic workplaces characterized by voting rights for workers (members), production and strategic decisions made by workers (often via majority rule), and worker ownership of net income and sharing of profits (Luhman, 2007). This context, with its extreme participation and ownership, relative to NWC's, has unique implications for what constitutes and drives quality worker performance, and for what leads workers to decide to quit. Consequently, given that all that is known about job performance and turnover has been derived from research on NWC's, WC's provide an ideal vehicle for investigating new insights into these important behaviors. Specifically, we explore collectivism, power distance, and materialism as worker characteristics that may be of particular relevance to acquiring and retaining talent in the WC environment. The primary potential contributions of this study are fourfold. First, the results of this study should inform the WC literature, which is lacking in individual-level examinations of managing the workforce, as to what factors drive worker performance and retention in WC's. Second, this study should subsequently help to identify specific worker recruiting and selection strategies that will allow WC's to hire individuals more likely to perform at a high level and less likely to quit. Third, by extending the employee performance and turnover research to WC's, the results here will inform the broader management literature as to what predicts these crucial behaviors in situations where employee participation, ownership, equality, and autonomy extend beyond the levels usually present in the NWC environment. This latter contribution will become increasingly important as WC's become more prevalent and as NWC's increase participation, ownership, and autonomy among employees. Indeed, given the generally positive effects on ownership would seem …