Internal Communication in cooperatives: do employees feel heard? Case estudy in MONDRAGON

Abstract

Internal communication is crucial in successful organizations; indeed, it affects employee motivation, participation, and productivity, among other things. Nevertheless, we must bear in mind that the effective practice of internal communication requires not only informing employees, but also listening to them. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to determine whether employees in cooperatives feel heard. Furthermore, in order to determine whether differences exist, all of these perceptions were examined taking the following variables into consideration: council membership, type of manual labor, work status, and place of work. In addition to a questionnaire completed by 224 employees of a MONDRAGON cooperative a total of 8 semi-structured interviews were also carried out. According to our results, the general perception of the employees is that their concerns and expectations are little heard. However, with respect to the perception of feeling heard, statistically significant differences were found in several variables.