ABSTRACT
Increasing worker participation is a common theme in the discussion of organizational behavior in public administration. Today that discussion is typically couched in a broader discussion of total quality management. Participatory management has a long history in the literature of organizations. It was at the heart of the human behavioral attack on classical approaches to organizational behavior, and specifically on Fredrick Taylor’s scientific management. Participation also figured prominently in the “new public administration” movement of the 1960s and 1970s which linked aspirations for political democracy with proposals for organizational democracy (Marini, 1971). Today, participatory management, expressed in the form of empowerment, self-directed work teams, and quality circles, is a central tenant of the total quality movement (TQM) in the U.S. and abroad (Crosby, 1984; Imai, 1986; Juran, 1988; Scholtes, 1992; Katzenbach and Smith, 1993; Deming, 1993; Costin, 1994; Imai, 1997). The substance of the human relations and TQM critiques of traditional management is that management control of workers through hierarchical structures reduces workers to the mechanical execution of work programmed by management. This legacy of scientific management must be replaced by worker participation in the decision-making process (Derber and Schwartz, 1983; Walton, 1986; Scholtes et al., 1994; Katzenbach and Smith, 1993; Deming, 1993; Costin, 1994; Lindsay and Petrick, 1997).
