ABSTRACT
The once radical cry for increased participation by employees in the workplace has now become the conventional wisdom for public sector management in the 1980s. Whereas the teachings of McGregor (1960) and Likert (1959) were once considered progressive, they are now treated as “classics” in textbooks and readers on personnel administration. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of these ideas of democratic/egalitarian/participative forms of management, and despite the wide scope of agreement that this style of administration is generally more appropriate than traditional bureaucratic/authoritarian forms, many administrators nevertheless continue to use nonparticipatory management practices. When questioned about such practices, non-participative supervisors or managers are quite likely to express support for participative management in principle while offering some rather compelling circumstantial reasons why participative practices would be fatal in their own situations (Schein 1974).
