An Experiment on Participation in a Latin American Factory

In a field experiment the extent of psychological participation was manipulated for three groups of women operators in the garment industry in Puerto Rico. It was found that a moderate level of participation through representatives led to greater increases in productivity than either a higher level of direct participation or a lower level of indirect participation, again through representatives. This result is compared with that of Coch and French who found that direct participation was more effective than participation through representation. No clear differences were found between the groups on other dependent variables or in the effect of conditioning variables. The main result, as well as trends in the data, suggests that the effects of participation are influenced by cross-cultural variations.