Participative Management Introduction Currently Work

¶ … Participative Management

Introduction currently work in a busy environment managing 15 other managers. The team concept or primary goal at my organization includes increasing profit for the first quarter. I believe participative management is vital for realizing this goal and encouraging employees to remain motivated and committed to the organization. The readings support the role of participative management in team oriented communities, suggesting through interactive and proactive management leaders can realize greater profits and less turn over in the organization. To successfully hit our group target, it is important as a manager I empower individual teams and employees to make decisions that will ultimately result in greater profitability. This involves converting people's beliefs so that people start thinking about the organization in a "we" concept instead of in an "I" concept.

Participative management also encourages team members to buy into goals because they have a personal stake in the success and well being of the company. This paper will discuss how important participative management is to realizing the organization's goals by reviewing some key concepts presented in the meeting. I argue that monitoring goal setting practices by providing positive and negative feedback to team members is important for organizational success, as is allowing employees to self-direct many of their daily activities. By doing so employees can feel like they are making sustainable and meaningful contributions to the organization as a whole.

Analysis of Work Environment

Many of the class readings support the use of participative management for building strong, trusting and successful relationships in the workplace. Kreitner & Kinicki (2004) emphasize how important it is for managers to build trusting relationships and empower their employees. The authors suggest managers can best achieve their goals by listening to their employees and creating "people centered" organizations. They support their arguments with research from companies throughout the United States and Germany, including large companies like Hewlett Packard. Kreitner & Kinicki (2004)also suggest people-centered management is more likely to reduce turn over and much more likely to increase profits. Other people centered practices emphasized by the authors include: (1) establishing job security for current employees to diminish unfounded fears of layoffs (2) emphasizing selective hiring so hiring managers can ensure they find good fits for the organization and its culture (3) emphasizing how important it is to empower employees by decentralizing management and creating self-managed teams (4) by creating a compensation program that focuses on "generous pay" linked with high performance and (5) by providing employees with adequate training to ensure their success as contributing members of the organization.

Other factors important to organizational success include emphasizing "we" within the organization or the concept that every member of the organization is part of an interactive team that must work together to realize the organization's goals. Trust building as the authors refer to this is vital to the organization's success in the short- and long-term, as well as its ability to meet its goals.

Goal setting is vital to participative management and the overall success of a single business unit and multiple units within the organization. To create a "we" environment as Kreitner & Kinicki (2004) suggest, a people centered organization must realize that what people think, do and how they react is most important. Feedback, both positive and negative, is also vital to help promote the team's efforts toward meeting or exceeding their goals and their manager's expectations.

Central to Kreitner & Kinicki's (2004) suggestions are the concept of organizational management, the idea that organization's routinely work to "employ, educate, serve, inform, feed" and look after the well being of their employees. These concepts can be easily integrated into goal setting practices to ensure the greater good of the organization and to ensure maximum effort and profitability from each member of the organization. An organization as defined by the authors includes a system of "consciously coordinated activities" among two or more people or groups that results in organizational achievement and success (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2004). Managers must consider this when working to set goals and achieve profitable organizational outcomes.

For efforts at goal setting to succeed, feedback is not the only key success factor. As a manager it is important to instill certain concepts into employees as suggested by the readings. These include the notions that work is a natural activity like any other, the idea that people working within the organization are very capable of self-directing their tasks when provided the opportunity and committed to organizational objectives, and that people are more likely to become committed to organizational objectives when managers appropriately reward them and recognize them for their efforts (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2004). Most employees are eager to accept more responsibility for their work and actions when given the opportunity to do so. Participative management allows each employee to take responsibility for his or her actions within the company and for helping the company achieve it's long-term and short-term objectives.

New models of organizational behavior suggest managers can break with old concepts of management and introduce more positive concepts to employees through participative management. By creating a more positive workplace, employees are more likely to excel and report self-motivation on and off the job. Employees are also more likely to view their abilities or self as capable and their work as influential and creative (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2004).