From a sociologist's point of view, employee participation in an organization mainly refers to the process in which organizational members express, integrate and fulfill a series of interests within the organization, participate in organizational affairs, protect their rights and interests and constantly reinforce their organizational identification and satisfaction. In the meantime, the active participation of employees contributes to the formation of a sense of “ownership”, driving employers and employees to close the distance and achieve mutual understanding and support, helping them jointly perceive wellbeing, gain and security through “participative management”, improving their organizational identification, and eventually optimizing organizational working conditions.

    Fundamentally, only when employees see their organization as their “home” will they spontaneously and gradually develop behaviors resisting individualization; in the meantime, they will be more willing to congregate in organizations that constantly facilitate the sense of belongingness and consensus, and work in organizations with good working atmospheres. The root cause of an organization lacking rationality is that there are few opportunities for employees to participate in organizational affairs as right owners and in that process, find their own sense of self-esteem within the organization. A lack of participation opportunities and self-esteemless participation can by no means shape good working conditions and thus allow high-quality working. The largest social significance of employee participation is that once it becomes a stable and sustained organizational culture, organizational members will develop a powerful cultural identification with the organization. It is such an organizational identification that helps people to generate a strong sense of responsibility for the organization, which is also the ultimate pursuit of any working conditions. Indeed, only when an organization is considered as a social community and the social attributes within are activated can participation be a truly meaningful mechanism and improvements in organizational working conditions can be fundamentally achieved.

    In this research, employee participation is specifically divided into three dimensions, namely, participation channels, participation atmosphere and participation decision-making.

    Formal participation channels include Party and League organizations, trade union, employees' representative congress (see Table 1) which provide employees with more formal and authoritative participation opportunities by organizing meetings or interviews where employees could voice their own opinions and problems to their superiors. For joint-stock or listed companies, the so-called “new three meetings”, namely, the meeting of shareholders, board of directors and board of supervisors, are crucial institutional participation channels. Representing power and decision-making supervisory bodies, they offer an opportunity for shareholders to participate in a company's decision-making and supervision, helping safeguard the company's legitimate rights and interests and improve its transparency and governance quality. Apart from the formal participation channels stated above, there are also some more convenient and flexible communication channels like complaint box, team meeting and WeChat group. These different types of participation channels have their own characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. Proper participation channels should be selected and set by organizations based on their own circumstances in order to better satisfy employees’ need for participation. With respect to the participation channels above, the variable takes the value of 1 if an urban laborer’s employer does not have the specified participation channel, and 0 if otherwise. Similarly, the variable takes the value of 1 if the laborer has used the specified participation channel provided by the employer, and 0 if otherwise.

Table 1 Operational question items on participation channels

    In terms of participation atmosphere, this research focuses on personal willingness to participate and organizational attitude to participation (see Table 2). Personal willingness to participate is specifically reflected by whether employees care about what is happening in their organizations and whether they are willing to voice their opinions on it. Organizational attitude to participation refers to an organization's attitude towards employee participation, which is specifically reflected by scenarios where leaders often require employees to participate in decision making, employees often have the opportunity to express their opinions on work improvement and both employees and leaders are able to speak up their minds at work. For each question item on personal willingness to participate, the options of “Untrue”, “Mostly True” and “Completely True” are designed, which take the values from 1 to 3, respectively. The higher the value, the higher employees’ willingness to participate. For organizational attitude to participation, each question item has five options from “Completely Untrue” to “Completely True” that takes the values of 1-5. The higher the value, the more positive the organizational attitude towards laborer participation.

    In terms of participation in decision-making, this research focuses on the dimensions of participation content and degree of participation in decision-making. The former involves decision-making of various affairs within an organization such as assignment of work tasks, wage adjustment, selection and promotion of cadres and deciding upon development direction (see Table 2). For each participation content, its degree of participation in decision making is measured by options of “decided by others without soliciting opinions”, “decided by others with opinions solicited”, “decided with others” and “decided by one person”, which respectively takes the values of 1-4. The higher the value, the higher the degree of participation in decision-making.

Table 2 Operational question items on participation atmosphere and participation in decision-making