Sharing is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Satisfaction in U.S. Manufacturing

Do employees fare better in firms they partly own? By examining workers’ reviews of their employers on the website Glassdoor, we offer the first expansive comparison of employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing on production workers and managers in an industry-labor market matched sample within U.S. manufacturing, we find that employees report greater satisfaction in employee-owned firms overall and within specific aspects of jobs such as their firms’ culture. Such differences in job quality cannot be rationalized by differences in skill demand and are greater when the ESOP is the product of collective bargaining. This work highlights how match quality can differ by ownership arrangement.

Recommended citation: Adrianto, Adrianto, Jason Sockin, Avner Ben-Ner, and Ainhoa Urtasun. "Sharing is Caring: Employee Stock Ownership Plans and Employee Satisfaction in US Manufacturing." In Academy of Management Proceedings, vol. 2024, no. 1, p. 17941.
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