Fostering the high‐involvement model of human resource management: what have we learnt and what challenges do we face?

The high‐involvement model of human resource management (HRM) is seen as offering major benefits to organisations, employees and societies through enhancing employee motivation, enabling people to reach more of their potential, and producing better quality and innovation. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that we can stimulate more of it by simply ‘turning up the volume’ on its virtues. In this article, we highlight what we have learnt about the model, including the contextual factors that enable and constrain its uptake. We also discuss the tensions that affect the quality and sustainability of particular implementations. These include the need to retain employee commitment when it is threatened by all‐too‐common periods of restructuring, the need to manage the relationship between greater involvement and work intensification, and the need to ensure a good match between the kinds of autonomy that employees value and the working arrangements that organisations need in complex, interdependent teamwork.