On September 4th, Xavier Hollandts defended his doctoral thesis on « The effects of employee ownership on business performance » at Lyon III University. The jury included referees Prof. Philippe Desbrières and Prof. Alain Schatt; advisory members Prof. Christophe Baret and Prof. Peter Wirtz, and thesis supervisor Prof. Pierre-Yves Gomez.

To download the PhD Dissertation: HOLLANDTS_THESE

This research focuses on the effects of employee ownership on business performance. The thesis probes the three dimensions of employee ownership: the economic dimension (employee shareholding), the political dimension (participation in corporate governance), and the organizational dimension.

The first section studies the theory underpinning the effects induced by employee ownership, harnessing input from several fields of business management research and resulting in the formulation of a set of research hypotheses.

This leads into a second, empirical analysis-based section studies the effects of employee ownership on enterprise performance, drawing on statistical testing of two population datasets. Population 1 is composed on 189 French firms listed over the 2001-2004 period, while cross-business population 2 is used to repurpose the analysis specifically towards the effects of employee ownership on corporate governance. The most substantive results show that: 1/ the relationship between employee shareholdership and enterprise performance is curvilinear; 2/ employee empowerment in decision-making down-moderates the employee shareholdership-business performance relationship

 The third section builds and presents a theoretical model based on cross-fertilization between the empirical output and theoretical analysis.