What would a workplace democracy index include? (Part II)
Into the weeds with Ahmed and Ahmed
Background: I had a conversation last week with a religious leader curious about how to implement democracy in their workplace. It inspired me to revisit my post from last year where I explored what a workplace democracy index might include. How might we come into an organization and analyze how democratic it is?
The organizational democracy scale: The most recent and comprehensive paper I could find came out in 2022. In it, two management scholars build and test an organizational democracy scale (a closely related idea). Their scale includes ten concepts:
Freedom
Fairness
Integrity
Tolerance
Shared responsibility
Structure
Transparency
Knowledge sharing
Accountability
[A] learning environment
Open questions: The paper doesn’t offer a definition of each of these terms, but it does suggest 2-5 questions organizations can ask their employees to get a sense of how employees view their organization and rate themselves on this scale.
That gets at how employees feel about their employers, but it doesn’t get at the structural and institutional questions political scientists are be interested in (see Part I).
It isn’t immediately clear to me from Ahmed and Ahmed’s list of questions how these criteria for organizational democracy differ from general criteria for good workplaces.
Still, it’s not a bad place to start! How would your organizations rate on the organizational democracy scale?
