Participative Decision Making - Levels of Participation

In the last byte, we looked at the individual foundations that help foster a participative decision making. In today's byte, we look at what levels of participation are found to be most satisfying and impact making.

When multiple people are involved in decision making, managers are generally in charge of the team's output and it is a must for them to understand some or the all stages where employees could play a role in decision making. Typical stages in decision making are - identifying problems, generating alternatives, selecting solution, planning implementation, evaluating results etc.

It is commonly seen and also ascertained by research that greater the involvement in all these stages, there is a greater satisfaction the employee finds and this translates into better performance.

Definitely, the decision process is not the same in all organizations and the culture plays a major role. None the less, in scenarios where the employee participation is not possible at all levels, employees are found to be give high pay-offs if involved in generating alternatives, planning implementations and evaluating results.