Having a voice in your group: Increasing productivity through group participation

Abstract

Participatory work structure is a popular concept but its causal impacts in real-world work groups have heretofore been unquantified and research has been Western-centric. We test the hypothesis that participatory group structure increases productivity for blue-collar workers in a context where participation is not a normative default. We conducted a pre-registered longitudinal field experiment with 65 Chinese factory groups (1752 workers). Half of the groups were randomly assigned to a 20-minute participatory meeting once per week for 6 weeks, in which the group's supervisor stepped aside and workers contributed ideas and personal goals in an open discussion of their work. The other half continued with status-quo meetings in which supervisors spoke and set goals, workers listened, and a researcher observed. We found that a participatory versus a hierarchical structure led to a 10.6% average increase in individual treatment workers' productivity, an increase that endured for 9 weeks after the experiment ended. The brief participatory meetings also increased treatment workers' retention rate (an 85% vs. 77% retention rate in treatment vs. control groups) and feelings of empowerment such as job satisfaction and sense of control. We found no evidence of informational gains or new worker goals; instead, evidence suggests that the increase in frequency of workers' voicing opinions may have driven higher productivity. These findings provide rare causal evidence in a setting where participation is not a normative default, indicating the benefits of direct group participation for changing and sustaining behavior and attitudes.