Workers blast workplace dictatorships

Office space with bamboo floors in the first ''green'' building on Capitol Hill in Washington July 12, 2007.

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - A quarter of working Americans view their workplace as a dictatorship and less than half think it promotes creativity, according to a U.S. survey on employee attitudes.

But a Zogby poll of 2,475 people commissioned by the nonprofit organization Workplace Democracy Association in Las Vegas also found that 51 percent of Americans said their co-workers often feel motivated.

"We live in a free and open society, but many of our workplace organizations use command-and-control style," Asher Adelman, founder and president of the association which advocates democratic policies in the workforce, said in an interview.

"People go to work and they're told what to do and how to do it and they're not given any decision abilities whatsoever," he added.

But employee discontent means more than just whiney colleagues -- it can impact everything from office turnover to productivity, Adelman said.

"Employees who don't feel like they're contributing to the company and being rewarded for their hard work see a big impact on their engagement, and that affects their productivity," he explained.

Sharing company strategy, providing access to profit-sharing plans and giving employees more freedom to perform their job as they see fit are often the solution to workplace satisfaction, but it comes at a cost.

"A big obstacle is getting over executive management's fear or giving up control," he said.

Eighty percent of those surveyed said they work better when they're given freedom to decide how to perform their job. Eighteen percent said they would feel more motivated if employees were hired by a group of co-workers instead of by bosses.

While those kinds of workplace practices are rare, Adelman said a handful of U.S. companies - many of them traditional bricks and mortar businesses -- already espouse them.

"Traditional companies in traditional industries stand to benefit from these practices the most because they're in such a competitive market," Adelman said.

Thirty-one percent of respondents said their managers sometimes or almost always hire the wrong people.

(Reporting by Lara Hertel; editing by Patricia Reaney)