Managing Participation in Organizational Decisions

Abstract

Involving subordinates in the process of making organizational decisions is widely thought to be helpful in improving the quality of decisions and also increasing the "ownership" of those decisions. However, participation also can have dysfunctional or even counterproductive effects. In a school system, the school principal or superintendent who is interested in utilizing participative decision making must have an accurate perception of when the staff should or should not be involved. To facilitate this, the authors suggest a three-part schema for classifying problems as viewed by subordinates: the Zone of Indif ference, Zone of Ambivalence, and Zone of Sensitivity. Based upon these con cepts, the authors developed and tested a technique for assessing the views of school faculty members as a source of data to guide principals and superin tendents in deciding whom to involve in dealing with what problems. The tech nique is broadly applicable to other types of organizations as well.