Discussion
Overall, we have confirmed all our working hypotheses as in Figure 4. This paper finds empirical support for the main hypothesis that employee participation in ownership and control empowers workers and enhances organizational trust for the firm, which in turn promotes commitment to performance and innovation at workplace. Most importantly, it shows that shared capitalism and worker participation are effective corporate institutions and policies beyond individual nudges such as incentives and bonuses. It hints that workplaces are social spaces in which group- or firm-level programs shape and influence organizational dynamics. A firm is not a gathering of individuals as atomic agents but rather a space of people as social beings. For further research, we may explore complementarity between shared capitalism and employee participation in decision making ( Jones et al., 2017; Kato and Morishima, 2002). It is a promising research question to ask whether shared claims to ownership and decision making interact with each other to produce greater effects upon organizational trust, commitment and productivity at workplace. In addition, we may take a closer look at how labor participation policies and institutions actually play out in everyday life within a firm. To do so, an ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation and in-depth interviews will be necessary to explore such dynamics.
