Intesa Sanpaolo's leveraged co-invested plan and its impact on employees' retention

Employee ownership plans are often considered useful tools for improving productive employees’ permanence in organisations, also enhancing their motivation and trust (Klein, 1987; Poole & Jenkins, 1991; Buchko, 1992). Given these evidences, the aim of this work is to analyse an atypical case of a broad-based employee ownership plan, introduced by an Italian multinational banking company, Intesa Sanpaolo, in order to assess the impact it had on employees’ retention and other specific aspects related to employees’ performance. Thus, the research questions can be synthetized as follows: a.) Which are the main aspects making this plan different from typical broad-based employee ownership plans? b.) Which dimensions should be considered to better analyse the impact of this plan on employees’ performances and retention? c.) According to the identified dimensions, have the objectives of retention and performance ultimately been achieved? The methodology employed in this research is a qualitative integrated approach, structured in three phases: 1) An exploratory case study (Yin, 2009) focused on the plan implemented by Intesa Sanpaolo; 2) A literature review focused on identifying a suitable model to analyse the impact of the plan on employees’ performances and retention; 3) An application of the selected model to analyse the plan’s impact. The exploratory case study firstly analyses the Italian normative, political and economic contextrelatively to the introduction of the abovementioned plans, then it focuses on the specific case of the Leveraged Co-Investment Plan (LECOIP) with the aim to identify its main characteristics, the motives of its introduction and expected impacts. This analysis has implied the study of the company’s organizational and technical documents and it has then been enriched with semistructured interviews with actors variously involved in the process of implementation and development of these plans. What emerged from this last phase has then been employed to compare existing employee ownership plans’ typologies with the plan implemented by Intesa Sanpaolo. The second phase of research focuses on studying the main existing models employed to analyse the effects of the introduction of a broad-based employee ownership plan. Then a model best fitting the case study has been selected. The last phase is still a work in progress and it intends to be dedicated to the application of the selected model to Intesa Sanpaolo’s case and to the discussion of the findings.