The management, economics, sociology, and psychology literatures describe a multitude
of avenues through which organizations attempt to succeed. One of the most traveled of these is
the management of human capital, which usually involves attempts to optimize the return on
investments in the workforce. These returns are frequently examined in terms of employee job
performance and voluntary turnover. Despite voluminous research on how best to facilitate
employee performance and to limit turnover, it is unclear how conventional wisdom regarding
these crucial behaviors applies when the fundamental nature of the employer-employee
relationship is markedly altered. The worker cooperative (WC) provides a particularly salient
and substantially understudied example of such an alternative relationship. Distinctly different
from organizations that are not cooperatives (referred to hereafter as NWC’s), WC’s are
democratic workplaces characterized by voting rights for workers (members), production and
strategic decisions made by workers (often via majority rule), and worker ownership of net
income and sharing of profits (Luhman, 2007). This context, with its extreme participation and
ownership, relative to NWC’s, has unique implications for what constitutes and drives quality
worker performance, and for what leads workers to decide to quit. Consequently, given that all
that is known about job performance and turnover has been derived from research on NWC’s,
WC’s provide an ideal vehicle for investigating new insights into these important behaviors.
Specifically, we explore collectivism, power distance, and materialism as worker characteristics
that may be of particular relevance to acquiring and retaining talent in the WC environment.