Works councils as gatekeepers: Codetermination, management practices, and job satisfaction

Christian Grund, Dirk Sliwka and Krystina Titz

Labour Economics, 2024, vol. 90, issue C

Abstract: This paper analyzes the role of works councils as gatekeepers safeguarding employee's interests in the adoption of management practices to monitor employee performance and provide feedback. We first introduce a formal model predicting that (i) the introduction of such management practices leads to a stronger increase (or weaker decrease) in job satisfaction when a works council is in place, (ii) that this effect should be larger the lower the prior level of employee participation and (iii) that works councils increase the likelihood of the implementation of these practices at the level of individual employees. We provide evidence in line with these hypotheses, using linked-employer-employee panel data from Germany. We indeed find that the adoption of formal performance appraisals and feedback interviews is associated with a significantly larger increase in job satisfaction when there is a works council. This pattern is driven by establishments without collective bargaining agreements. The evidence also suggests that works councils indeed facilitate the implementation of such management practices, as codetermined firms have a higher likelihood that a practice implemented on the firm level is actually applied by middle management.

Keywords: Works councils; Codetermination; Management practices; Performance appraisal; Feedback interview; Job satisfaction; Linked employer-employee data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537124000587
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:90:y:2024:i:c:s0927537124000587

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102563

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().