Employees are increasingly being asked to take a more active role in work-related decisions across a wide range of organizational settings. The movement toward increased employee involvement results from the demands of increasingly complex production systems that require greater employee involvement and initiative in order to operate efficiently. Increased worker initiative in developing strategies to meet production goals is expected from factories (Starkey and McKinlay 1994) to offices (Heckscher and Donnellon 1994) to service settings (Mueller et al. 1994; Smith 1996). The fourth challenge to working with dignity facing employees today is the challenge of translating productivity gains resulting from employee involvement into similar gains for employee dignity. Employee involvement has the potential to extend the sort of bilateral involvement with management previously reserved for skilled professional and craft workers to a wider range of employees. But increased employee involvement has also been associated with downsizing and work intensification and therefore has many contradictory elements – not all of which have positive implications for working with dignity.

The demand for increased employee involvement has attracted considerable attention both in the academic literature and in the business world (Drucker 1993; Pfeffer 1998). The prevalence and diversity of employee participation have been highlighted by Appelbaum and Batt (1994), Osterman (1994), Smith (1997), and Vallas (1999). Employee participation will not be introduced comprehensively all at once since different types of work in complex societies vary greatly in their requirements and organization.