Stockowner-Employee (SOE) Partnership Project: The first of its kind in Korea

This project seeks to go beyond the traditional framework of the relationship between stockowners and employees of a company. Though the two groups are interrelated stakeholders of a corporation, in reality they are separated and have little interaction. This project will empirically examine this detached relationship.

The starting point is the recognition by a company’s long-term stockowners of the fact that their investments were successful due in part to the hard work and efforts of the company’s employees – and thus, stockowners have a sense of gratitude towards those employees. In particular, the act of giving back stocks to each individual employee breaks the conventional separation of the two groups. However, this method has no precedent and is rather complicated, and thus is a rare find.

There are cases where corporate management redistributes a portion of profits as performance incentives to employees or implements employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), but there are no previous examples of majority stockowners sharing their profits from rising stock prices with the employees. As the Occupy Wall Street protest and similar social movements show, we are more familiar with the image of greedy and covetous capitalists. Amidst this social climate, the voluntary action of an individual stockowner with no control over actual management practices is a fresh stimulation. This project, through social science analysis, will investigate the unspoken standards of fairness and justice among employees and assert that the efforts to share profits and gains will contribute towards cooperative coexistence between the middle class and ordinary citizens. This can pioneer the desirable directions for the development of Korean society in the future.