Sunday, January 12, 2014

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.

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