Participatory management -- does the practice work?

Participatory management. Self-managed teams. Employee empowerment.

Management theorists like to toss these terms around. But for most average workers, they amount to oxymorons.

Although participatory management has been a popular theme in management books, seminars and directives for the past decade, it hasn't worked very well in the real world. Part of the problem is that people can't agree on what participatory management even means, said T.J. Elliott, research director of Cavanaugh Leahy & Co., an organizational consulting firm based in New York. Although more than 400 books and articles have been written on the topic in the past decade, it's still very much an enigma, Elliott said. "We found that participatory management, which has long had a following in professional journals and academic circles, is growing in the mainstream business press as well as in organizational practices," he said. "But our study also revealed deep differences over the meaning of the term, scant guidance on how to implement participatory management, striking ambivalence about its efficacy and little appreciation of what it actually requires." Participatory management means employees have the authority to manage themselves and their workplaces, Elliott said. "It's clearly placing the role of decision-making in employee hands so they can participate in their own management." But in the work world, there is a lot of confusion over what participatory management entails. Concepts vary from using work teams to mandating employee involvement and to having employee suggestion programs, he said. Some companies equate participatory management with issuing stock options. Others identify "total quality management" efforts as participatory management programs. Still others say it's as simple as "getting out and hobnobbing with employees." Studies reflect the confusion. One study cited in Incentive magazine said fewer than 10 percent of companies have "true participatory management." Another, cited by the Journal of Commerce, said about 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies have worker involvement programs. The problem is many programs appear to solicit participation, but don't give employees real authority, he said. Employee suggestion programs, for example, aren't really participatory since management doesn't have to act on the ideas. Such discrepancies were reflected in yet another study. A Wyatt survey of 4,300 Americans reported that 61 percent of senior managers thought they did a good job of involving employees in decisions. Two- thirds of non-managerial workers in the same survey disagreed. Still, the notion of participatory management has a powerful draw. Companies keep trying different approaches. It takes communication, resources, commitment and follow-through to make participatory management work, Elliott said. The payoff comes in a more energized work force, people who are more productive, creative and engaged in their work. In true participatory management, employees have both the authority to act on their decisions and the responsibility to follow through on them. To make such programs effective, there has to be a mechanism for accountability, he said. "You have to be specific about who is going to do what by when." And for this system to work, resources have to be available so employees can do what they've decided needs to be done. Asking for input, then not acting on it, tends to breed cynicism. Participatory management isn't suited to every company or every situation, he said. "If you're rowing the lifeboat away from the Titanic, participatory management might not be the way to go." And not every function in a company lends itself to participation. "You can't have (employees) rendering decisions about things that aren't negotiable," he said. Companies wouldn't use participation, for example, to revise human resources policies. Companies benefit most from participation in areas where they need diverse voices, such as developing new strategies, he said. "When you get people involved, you tap into a much broader range of knowledge." There is, of course, a downside to encouraging participation. "The risk is employees may challenge (management's ideas,)" he said. "They may come up with things that you're not comfortable with." But then again, that's the whole point.

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