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Category: Participative Decision Making

  • Participative Decision Making 3

    In the last byte, we discussed about the advantages of participative decision making and how technology has influencing decentralized decision making. In today’s byte, we look at the foundations on which we could build participative decision making primarily organizational in dimension.

    We could classify the foundations necessary for a participative decision making, which enables empowering of employees towards enhanced task motivation and performance under two heads.
    1. Organizational
    2. Individual
    Organizational factors like a supportive organization culture and team-oriented work design play a major role in empowerment of the teams. Let’s understand this a bit, when we empower a lower level employee to make decisions – it is quite possible that the middle level management could sense fear and anxiety and in some extreme cases even terror! The senior leadership in such a scenario must create a culture that is reassuring to the middle level managers and also be supportive. If this factor is overlooked the middle management could turn into a restraining or disruptive force that puts participative decision making efforts off track.
     
    The design of work in these organizations shouldn’t be just limited to the concept of work specialization and narrow task definitions which make the work extremely routine in nature. This should be replaced with a more absolving and responsible of the complete piece of the work – we call this approach a team-oriented work design. This team oriented work design is a key organizational foundation that helps achieve broader tasks and a responsible execution.

  • Participative Decision Making 2

    In the last byte, we began our discussion on participative decision making. In today’s byte, we continue the discussion further.

    Participative decision making has several advantages to it; some of them are discussed in here:
    1. Given that the people affected by decision are generally involved in the decision making process, this helps reduce (if not eliminate) the negative experiences that could arise from organizational politics.
    2. Participative decision making helps increase employee creativity, job satisfaction and productivity. The employees involved look at the implementation of their choices, suggestions etc and this plays a crucial role in job satisfaction. The sense of ownership of the decision made helps increase productivity!
    It is interesting to note that the business environment of the present day is playing a huge role in fostering participative decision making.  We today live in a knowledge driven economy and the points of highest knowledge generation is typically at the boundaries of the organization – tapping them is quintessential for sustaining business advantage. Also, the advent of new technology and communication means has helped make decisions quick and decentralized!

  • Participative Decision Making

    In The last byte, we looked at the various types of creativity. In today’s byte, begin our discussion on how to unleash the potential of participation in decision making. 

    Intuition and Creativity are extremely handy in decision making, however there is not a prerogative that these are properties of managers alone – people at any level could pitch in with the relevant inputs for a better decision. With companies employing a large work force, effective management of the people could help the company improve its economic performance tremendously. Participative Decision making is one such means by which companies could capitalize on the power of its people.

    Participative decision making is a kind of decision making in which individuals who are affected by decision influences the making of decisions. In such cases the company generally created an empowered self-managed team to make decisions.
     
    Let’s take an example to understand this – In a hospitality industry – guests residing in the hotels have various requests and they interact extensively with the guest service personnel. Empowering the guest service personnel to do whatever is necessary to make guests happy – without really consulting their supervisors could be one way in which this could be used!  (Definitely the cultural context in which such decisions are made cannot be ignored.)