What if the secret to boosting productivity isn’t stricter rules or higher pay, but something as simple as giving workers a voice? Sherry Jueyu Wu shares a field experiment from the production floors of a Chinese factory, which asked whether participatory meetings – in which workers spoke and supervisors listened – could increase productivity. The answer is yes. These findings challenge conventional wisdom about hierarchy and efficiency, and suggest that voice may be a powerful yet underutilized tool for organizations.
Participation as a Puzzle
Participation at work is a long-debated idea. Economists have wondered whether participation helps economies grow. Organizational scholars ask whether it makes teams more efficient. Political scientists see it as a building block of democracy.
But there’s a catch: People do not always expect participation to work. We surveyed hundreds of full-time employees on their perceptions of workplace participation. People expect participation to boost morale without affecting productivity. In fact, many of them think giving workers a voice would even slow things down. Similarly, from my ethnographic field work, I learned that factory managers often do not welcome participation, and definitely do not consider it as a driver of hard outcomes like performance.
Do the expectations meet the reality? Despite decades of speculation, there is surprisingly little causal evidence on how worker participation shapes actual behavior. In addition, most studies rely on self-reports rather than data on earnings and productivity. To elicit causal inferences, my co-author Elizabeth Levy Paluck and I set out to test the question directly: What happens when you introduce participatory practices into real-world groups and track their long-term effects on productivity and attitudes?
A Field Experiment on the Factory Floor: Productivity Gains that Last
We partnered with a large multinational garment factory in China. Like many factories, its daily meetings followed a strict hierarchy: supervisors spoke, workers listened.
We randomly assigned half of the factory’s 65 sewing groups (1,752 workers in total, most of them women in their twenties and early thirties) to a new format. These workers work on a piece-rate scheme where productivity directly translates into money. For six weeks, a random half of groups held weekly 20-minute meetings where supervisors stepped back and workers were encouraged to share experiences, strategies, and personal production goals. The other half of the groups continued with their standard supervisor-led meetings, observed by researchers to control for simple “Hawthorne effects.”
This group intervention – just two hours of participatory discussion spread over six weeks – delivered results: workers who were invited to voice their opinions and goals earned on average 592 Yuan more than those in control groups. In other words, they increased their productivity by more than 10 percent (all results are statistically significant).
These were not temporary gains. Even after the participatory meetings ended, productivity remained higher for nine weeks. Importantly, the increase was not because workers were putting in more hours. Productivity per hour rose. That means workers were literally producing more with the same amount of time.
Figure 1: Comparing worker productivity between the participatory discussion group and comparison group
Source: Wu and Paluck, 2025
Feeling Empowered at Work
The meetings changed not just output; they also changed how workers felt about their jobs.
Surveys conducted one and four weeks after the experiment showed that workers in the participatory condition reported higher job satisfaction, greater sense of control, and stronger feelings that the factory respected them. They also felt less lonely at work.
Interestingly, these changes in attitude did not always line up neatly with the productivity gains. Workers did not always perceive themselves as more productive, even though the numbers clearly showed that they were. That mismatch highlights an important lesson: behaviour change may not always be visible in self-reports, but it can show up in behavioural data.
What’s Inside the ‘Black Box’ of Participation?
So how does a short participatory meeting change behavior? We dug into three possible explanations.
- Information sharing: Did workers learn new strategies from each other? The data suggest not. Groups did not gain an informational edge over their peers.
- Goal-setting: Did workers align around higher or more ambitious goals? Again, no clear evidence.
- Voice itself: The strongest evidence was that the amount of time workers spent speaking – about production issues or even non-work topics – was correlated with productivity. A 25% increase in speaking time predicted hundreds of dollars more in group output. When supervisors encouraged worker voice, productivity rose further; when they interrupted, productivity fell.
The evidence points to voice itself – the act of speaking and being heard – as a motivational force. Even without better strategies or clearer goals, workers seemed to work harder when their opinions mattered.
Why China? Why Women Workers?
One might think that participatory practices would work best in Western workplaces, where “flat hierarchies” are more culturally accepted. But we deliberately chose a Chinese factory, where hierarchy is valued and participation is rare.
That context made the experiment a tough test: we speculate that if participatory meetings could work here, they could work almost anywhere. The fact that most workers were young women – who typically sit low in both workplace and social hierarchies – makes the results even more striking. For these workers, having a voice was not just unusual; it might be transformative.
Of course, one might wonder whether the effect was unique to this context. To address that question, we conducted a follow-up field experiment with 40 university administrative teams in the United States. The results echoed those from the factory floor, with a similar boost in productivity – suggesting that the benefits of participatory meetings travel across very different cultural and organizational settings.
Implications for Organizations and Policy
For managers, the takeaway is clear: participation does not need to be complicated or time-consuming. Setting aside 20 minutes a week for genuine worker voice – without supervisors dominating – can yield measurable gains in productivity and retention.
For policymakers, the study offers causal evidence that group-based workplace participation can benefit both workers and firms. While debates over co-determination and shared governance often focus on structural reforms, our findings suggest that even group-level practices of voice can be beneficial.
And for researchers, the study underscores the need to look beyond self-reported behaviors to actual observations. Workers may not report feeling more productive, but their output tells a different story.
At a time when many organizations are experimenting with new ways of working – remote, hybrid, cross-cultural – this study is a reminder of a simple fact: people work harder when they feel heard.
Participation may not always change what workers know or the goals they set. But it can change how motivated they feel, how connected they are to their groups, and ultimately, how much they produce.
This experiment shows that giving people a voice isn’t just good for morale. It’s good for business. To learn more about the study, read the article here.
Sherry Jueyu Wu is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations & Behavioral Decision Making at the Anderson School of Management, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research is centered around the complementary themes of interconnection (i.e., what motivates us for group participation and collective change) and inequality (i.e., what separates us into “us” versus “them” in organizational and social hierarchies). She employs a variety of research methods including large-scale field experiments, cross-cultural laboratory experiments, ethnography, and time-series designs, to advance both theoretical understanding of and pragmatic intervention in behavior and attitudes.