The Influence of Workers' Participation on the Power of Management in Transitional Countries: The Case of Slovenia

Abstract

The main aim of our paper is to discuss the influence of the different forms of the workers' participation on the power of management and experts in carrying out the restructuring of the Slovenian firms. The firms with the strongest influence of the management and the experts resulted to be more successful in developing the strategic way of thinking, to have clearer and more defined strategies and goals and to adapt better to the international competition. Our empirical analysis further confirms the hypothesis that the management and experts have a stronger influence in the firms with higher internal ownership, younger management and in those that have successfully implemented the intra-firm bargaining. On the other hand, the management and experts' power is negatively correlated with the percentage of the workers' representatives on the Supervisory Board.