This article examines the role of management in the system of employee participation. It builds on the premise that management can have a sizeable impact on how employee participation is put into practice. The authors develop a comprehensive index of employee participation implementation and test the relation between management’s attitudes towards employee participation and the implementation of employee participation in a cross-sectional survey among 225 managers in Slovenia, using a mail-solicited web-based questionnaire. The results indicate a positive link between managers’ support for participation and its actual implementation. If managers perceive a positive link between employee participation and corporate performance they will tend to put such participation into practice to a greater extent.