Participative Management

Participative management is a new approach in the work force today. Job enrichment, quality circles, and self-managing work teams are just some of the approaches. Companies share a common goal of increasing employee involvement. They want to raise the quality, performance, and productivity of their workers.

The questions that follow will be answered in this paper. What is participative management? What are the advantages of participative management? How does it raise quality, productivity, and performance? How can it be successfully started, implemented, and sustained? What are the results of experiments done in the work force?

Participative management is a process by which a company attempts to increase the

Once an employee decides not to become involved in such a program, he or she should not be singled out as refusing to be a team player and viewed in a negative manner. It is very important that the attitudes of these employees continue to be respected.

Step five: A participative management program should not be implemented across the entire organization all at once.

It should start in small departmental groups where there is a consensus that the employees are willing to get together to discuss mutual problems and come up with some solutions. It is very important that once ideas come forward from the groups, management should be ready to follow up and implement these ideas whenever possible. It is advisable to start with the easier problems first and then go to the more difficult problems later.

Step six: Management should not initiate a participative management program to try to save an organization from destruction as a last chance effort.

An employee involvement program should not be used as an alternative when other more serious changes need to be made first in the organization. These programs have been used in organizations for the above reasons and have failed because of their intent and because they were implemented too

In a hostile environment the first step in an employee involvement program is to have off-site meetings. Management members and union officials sit down with each other, have an opportunity to communicate together, and realize that they are not really enemies but that they are all employees of the same organization. Getting to know each other on a more personal basis is definitely important as an icebreaker. The important thing here is that both sides begin to share their thoughts on the state of the business. Establishing trust and initiating the necessary culture change in preparation for a participative management program takes time, usually years. It is certainly not advisable to start a program of this nature when employees do not trust each other. It will not work. The employees must be ready to accept such a program even after top management and the union officials are supportive of such a program. As management and the employees begin communicating and establishing trust among themselves, and adequate training is being provided on the participative style, management then needs to start asking employees for their opinions relative to their own jobs. As the process of employee involvement evolves, usually the next step is to start employee participation groups which usually center around a particular