Refocusing Worker Participation: The Struggles with Construct Validity

There is a recent surge in interest in understanding worker participation as a theoretical construct. A major challenge in this regard which scholars identified decades ago, is construct validity. This paper revisits this challenge by reviewing definitions and the multi-level nomological network of worker participation that covers various studies conducted during 1995- 2013, within Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Strategic Human Resource Management and Industrial Relations and Labor Economics disciplines. Further, the effectiveness of this research in defining participation in terms of its components and its effects is evaluated. The evaluation shows that although umbrella conceptualization of worker participation has weakened its construct validity, paradoxically, such a conceptualization also helped increase the construct validity by embedding participation in a rich nomological network. Therefore, I argue for considering this paradox while conceptualizing and operationalizing worker participation instead of advocating narrow definition to increase construct validity as it is done currently. Building on this argument, I propose a framework to assess the effectiveness of defining complex theoretical constructs.