Some Descriptive Studies of Participation in Decision-Making

Abstract : The paper deals with the determinants of a manager's choice among a set of processes for making decisions in organizations, varying in the extent to which his subordinates have an opportunity to participate in decision-making. A set of four empirical studies is described. The first demonstrates that the decision process used varies not only across managers, as implied in past research, but also within a single manager across situations. The second study develops a metric for scaling the set of five decision processes on a unidimensional scale of participation. The third and fourth studies are concerned principally with identifying the situations in which managers choose to retain decision-making power or share it with their subordinates. (Author)