Employee voice and the ambiguity of organisational size: a comparative case study of employee voice mechanisms and practices used by a multinational engineering company and one of their suppliers in each of their manufacturing operations including how their respective degrees of employee voice influence productivity, product quality and health and safety issues

This thesis compares the level of employee voice operating between two companies from the same industrial sector, one being a large multinational and the other a SME with a view to evaluate if size is a determinant. The findings are that whilst the level of voice is not statistically significantly associated with size and is not very different between the two organisations, size is not the direct determinant, it is other factors often connected with size that control it; namely the degree of formality and proceduralism. The very procedural nature of the organisation in the multinational appears to be a key factor retarding the involvement by employees whilst in the SME it is the lack of procedures designed to encourage participation which appears to be a factor retarding employee voice. Furthermore, both companies suffer from an absence of direct involvement of shop floor personnel due to the absence of team meetings, for differing reasons; a lack of confidence in the ability of team leaders in the SME and the lack of their permanent allocation to teams in the MNE. It is stressed that these findings can only be assumed correct for these two particular companies but the research strategy could usefully be applied to other pairs of company differing in size but from different sectors and using longitudinal studies, rather than this type of cross-sectional study. There is however a warning that before any useful data can be accumulated regarding productivity and other operational outcomes, meaningful measures of potential outcomes must be in place or designed and agreement on how any such operational improvements are to be attributed to the level of employee voice and engagement by employees.