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

Human social groups exert powerful influence over their members’ behavior. We test the hypothesis that increasing individuals’ participation in their group turns the group into a source of higher motivation. We conducted a 6-week 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 six 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, workers listened, and a researcher observed. We found that participatory vs. a hierarchical structure led to a 10.6% average increase in individual treatment workers’ productivity, an increase that endured for 9 weeks after the participatory experiment ended. The brief participatory meetings also increased treatment workers’ feelings of empowerment such as job satisfaction and sense of control. We find no evidence that informational gains or new worker goals were responsible for increases in productivity; instead, evidence suggests that the increase in frequency of workers’ voicing opinions may have driven higher productivity. Participatory work structure is a popular concept but its causal impacts in real world work groups have heretofore been unidentified and research has been Western-centric. The results contribute a richer theoretical understanding of participatory group structures, and a pragmatic intervention for behavior change.