Psychological research on organizational democracy: A meta‐analysis of individual, organizational, and societal outcomes

Our meta-analytic review investigates how employee participation in democratic enterprises is related to psychological outcomes. We gathered 60 studies through a systematic literature search of quantitative field studies (published between January 1970 and May 2017) and extracted 138 effect sizes related to three indicators of organisational democracy (OD) and 15 psychological outcomes. The overall findings suggest that employees' individually perceived participation in organisational decision making (IPD) had a stronger relation to job satisfaction (rho = .25), job involvement/work motivation (rho = .36), prosocial work behaviours (rho = .24), civic and democratic behaviours (rho = .21) and perceived supportive climate (rho = .44) than the other two OD indicators: structurally anchored employee participation (SAEP) and employee participation in collective ownership (EO). This was not the case for value-based commitment: the relations of SAEP (rho = .40), EO (rho = .34), and IPD (rho = .46) with commitment were nearly equal. Mediation analyses indicated that IPD partially mediated most of the effects of SAEP and EO on the outcomes mentioned. The cross-sectional database and a small number of studies for some of the outcomes are the main limitations of this study.