Generational perspectives on employee ownership: The relationship between age and satisfaction with cooperative ownership in Mondragon

Resumen

The Mondragon cooperative group, of the Basque Country of northern Spain, is frequently considered the most successful example of worker-owned enterprise in the world, employing more than 100,000 people with annual sales of over $20 billion. Substantial cultural and economic changes have taken place since the cooperatives' founding era, and this dissertation addresses an important debate underway in Mondragon about whether satisfaction with ownership arrangements is now significantly lower among younger workers than among their older colleagues. This question is virtually unexplored in the literature on cooperative and employee-owned firms and is crucial to the continued survival and success of Mondragon as well as the now large and growing number of other substantially employee-owned firms over ten years old. The study presented here examines the relationship between age and satisfaction with cooperative ownership, as well as between age and worklife satisfaction, and then compares the two. Two areas of the social science literature are explored. In the first area, we find that worker-owners often evaluate co-ownership positively, but not infrequently they have very mixed attitudes about it. Research suggests that the degree of fulfillment of employee-owners' expectations of ownership are closely associated with ownership satisfaction. Research in the second area suggests age is an important variable to consider in this context. Age is frequently found to be correlated with employees' perceptions of their organizations, and important attitudinal differences exist among age cohorts in the broader society. This dissertation examines questionnaire data from a sample of 2692 workers taken in 2003 from an industrial cooperative in the Mondragon group. Analyses of covariance are carried out, controlling for several employee characteristic variables and employee perception variables. Results are varied. In simple models, older workers are more satisfied with ownership. In multivariate models, younger workers are more satisfied, but differences are modest-to-moderate in both cases. I conclude that age is a relatively unimportant variable; work practices and job security dominate as predictors of ownership satisfaction. The practical and scientific importance of the results is considered.