Management Formality, Size of Firm and Employee Evaluations of Work

A headline result from WERS 2004 is that measures of employee ‘satisfaction’ are higher in small than large firms. This paper pursues this issue further. We conceptualise ‘satisfaction’ more exactly as the employee evaluation of work experience (EEWE) and provide theoretical reasons to expect the observed relationship. We then interrogate it in two main ways. First, we address the size of the workplace as well as the size of the firm, and also make distinctions between workplaces that are part of multi-site companies and stand-alone sites. Second, the relationship between size and the EEWE is often explained in terms of ‘small firm informality’. We develop a measure of formality to test this idea. Formality was indeed related to size, both of workplace and firm. It also had associations with the EEWE. Relationships here were complex, but there was a clear tendency for the effect to be negative in smaller single-site firms.