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.)