Participative management Essay Example For Students

Participative management Essay 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 potential of its employees by involving them in decisions affecting their work lives. A distinguishing characteristic of the process is that its goals are not simply acquired, they focus on the improvement of productivity and efficiency, but they are also fulfilling and self-enhan cing in themselves. The key goals of employee involvement programs is to enhance the quality of the employees’ working life, management must be responsive to the requests of the employees. The best way to ascertain those requests is to ask employees. If workers can be motivated and given the opportunity to participate in the search for improved methods of job performance, and if this motivation and participation can be maintained over time, job performance should improve. Productivity is higher in companies with an organized program of worker participation. Employee participation can and does raise productivity. The most appropriate form will vary from company to company but participation works only when both parties want it to work. The solution to America’s pathetic productivity growth isn’t necessarily more capital spending (Lewis Renn, 1992). People tend to accomplish what they decide they want to accomplish. Ideas, changes, suggestions and recommendations that are generated by the people who implement them stand a much greater chance of being successfully implemented. In theory, people who have a hand in making a decision are better motivated to execute it. Participation can improve the quality of decision making. Participative management appears to offer tremendous advantages. It can create organizations where people at all levels think for themselves and manage their own work, then far fewer employees will be needed and those who remain will have more rewarding and satisfying jobs. This in turn could help make the higher labor costs in the United States competitive because lower-level employees would be contributing more by using both their hands and their minds. It could lead to higher-quality products that are internationally competitive. If our companies were able to effectively utilize participative management, the advantages could be tremendous. We could be a more productive society in which work contributes to the quality of people’s lives. We could again be competitive in international markets, be admired for our management skills, and be a society whose workplaces are a source of pride and power. We might also come much closer to matching the reality of how people are treated: with respect; dignity; democratic rights; individual rights; and the right to share in the fruits of their labor (Lawler, 1990). These values have made our society for over two centuries but they have not provided much power for our work environment. There are ten steps stated by Jerre Lewis and Leslie Renn to implementing a successful participative management program. Step one: Support of top management and union leadership. Top management must sanction and be supportive of any participative management and employee involvement program. It is very important that once top management has made the decision in favor of participative management, all supervisory personnel be properly trained on how to change their management style from the old traditional hard line approach to the participatory style. Union leadership must also be prepared for embarking on a participative management program. Many union leaders have feared that participative management and employee involvement programs wo uld undermine the role of the local union and the collective bargaining agreements. Without the support of the union leadership, the program will fail. Step two: Employees must be ready to accept a participative management program. In order for employees to be receptive to such a program, a culture change must occur. Implementing a participative management program in an adversarial work climate will not work and be successful. Employees must be willing to change and desire to start working together as a team. This culture change does not happen overnight. Everyone in the organization must have the same equal opportunity to become involved in decision making relative to his or her own job. Step three: Establish trust amongst all employees. Trust is the glue that binds employees together in an organization. An employee involvement program will not be successful without trust. Management must initiate trust among its employees. In order for trust to occur, honesty and integrity must prevail. Management should not make any promises to its employees that it can not deliver on and back up. Trust is an extremely important element in any participative management program and must be established as such or the program will not be a success. Step four: Any participative management program should be initiated on a voluntary basis. Employees should not be forced to participate in decision making against their own will. 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. Dumpster Diving EssayThe key to sustaining a successful participative management program is in the relations between unions and management. It lies in the philosophy of, and the commitment to, cooperation. A cooperative labor/management stance will lead to improved quality and increased productivity; an adversarial stance will lead only to discord (Lewis Renn, 1992). If participation in workplace problem solving dispersed across a sufficiently large portion of the workforce, then organizational effectiveness should also improve. High levels of trust, commitment, and participation can be maintained over time and across large numbers of workers, however, only if they are reinforced by higher level business and collective bargaining strategies. There have been many successful implementations of the participative management program. One company that tried was General Motors. They have an old plant in Fremont, California that began producing cars again. The plant was completely renovat ed and the only things left was the shell of the old main building and some of the old employees. Just about everything else was new such as corporate sponsorship, operating philosophy, and the manufacturing system. The new United Motor Manufacturing Inc. is a joint venture of General Motors and Toyota. It was set up as a means through which General Motors could learn the Japanese Manufacturing system, and the Japanese could learn how to operate in an American context. An open environment was established at Nummi in which joint problem solving by labor and management, seeking options for mutual gain while developing good faith and trust, prevailed. The quality of life at work in turn resulted in better performance and higher productivity on the job (Lewis Renn, 1992). Motorola is another success. Their participative management program is operating for more than ninety-five percent of their manufacturing employees and has been dramatically successful (Lawler, 1986). Honeywell, Proct or Gamble, and dozens of other companies have built new-design plants that minimize the distance between workers and managers. The plants involve employees in many decisions and are structured on the basis of work teams. In some plants employees make pay, hiring, scheduling, and quality decisions. Honeywell, Xerox, Motorola, Ford, General Motors (GM), and Westinghouse have all publicly committed themselves to using a more participative approach to organizing and managing people. Their change programs are even more significant than the increased use of such practices as quality circles, gainsharing, and self-managing teams because they are trying to change the entire organization, not just a few plants or a few practices (Lawler, 1986). The work place of the future will require greater emphasis on such key human resource factors as participative management, training programs, and teamwork. Employee involvement and participative initiatives are likely to expand considerably over the next several years in United States businesses. If they are to remain competitive in the marketplace and survive with the intense overseas challenges awaiting them, worker involvement and these initiatives must be present. BibliographyLawler III, E. (1986). High-Involvement Management. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers. Lewis, J. Renn, L. (1992). How To Start A Participative Management Program: Ten Easy Steps. Interlochen: Lewis Renn Associates, Inc. Schuller, T. (1985). Democracy at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sirianni, C. (1987). Worker Participation and the Politics of Reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Warner, M. (1984). Organizations and Experiments: Designing New Ways of Managing Work. New York: John Wiley Sons.