1. 12 PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT:
VIABLE APPROACH FOR EMPLOYEE
EMPOWERMENT?
INTRODUCTION
One of the main characteristics of human resource management practice is the
focus on the employee as a valuable asset. Today, the employee is no longer
viewed as collective and dispensable but is increasingly viewed as an individual
with proactive inputs to the production processes, the source of the organiza-
tion’s competitive advantage (Bacon 2003, Legge 2005, Ramaswamy 2000). In
line with this view, emphasis now has been placed on raising commitment in
employees through their involvement (Bacon 2003). Participative Management
(herein after will be referred to as PM) has gained the currency as a way of en-
suring employee’s involvement, and consequently, the optimal use of the hu-
man resources. PM is being recognized as the new approach that takes the
place of the old notion of worker’s participation and industrial democracy
(Marchington 2001, Hyman and Mason 1995).
As the name implies, PM aims to gain the optimal use of human resources
by allowing employees to be involved more, which can be achieved through
upward and downward communication, financial involvement, task-based par-
ticipation and team working (Marchington 2001: 235-7). These practices have
been praised as a major step towards employee’s empowerment, because with
PM the ‘sources of powerlessness’ of the employee can be eliminated1. As a
result, the optimal use of the employees can be gained. Thus employee empow-
erment is something that is important not only for the interest of the worker,
but also for the management. As Foy (1994: xvii) has articulated, empowering
people is as important today as involving them in 1980s and getting them to par-
ticipate in the 1970s’ (cited in Holden 2001: 559, emphasis added).
Numerous studies have been done to examine the effect of participative
management toward the employee’s empowerment, and the results are showing
that it has positive implications. However, there are also many competing stud-
ies which show that the idea of PM is not as good in practice as it is on paper.
Despite its beautiful scheme of involving employees more, PM actually does
1 Employee’ empowerment is ‘... a process of enhancing feelings of self-efficacy among
organizational members through the identification of conditions that foster powerless-
ness and through their removal by both formal organizational practices and informal
techniques of providing efficacy information’ (Conger and Kanungo 1988: 474, cited in
Styhre 2004: 1445).
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2. PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: A VIABLE APPROACH FOR EMPLOYEE’S EMPOWERMENT
not contribute much to the employee’s empowerment. This conflict in views
raises the question of the viability this particular scheme, which holds the no-
tion that its practices should be directed to the ‘empowerment of people’.
This essay will try to bring together the two different discourses on the vi-
ability or unviability of PM and whether it really does establish employee em-
powerment. Is also argues that there are different routes to empowerment,
which should not only be assessed from direct and tangible outcomes, but also
on the basis of indirect and intangible outcomes. I will also try to identify the
conditions under which PM may face difficulties in empowering the workers. It
is argued that ideally PM can be a vehicle for bringing in the employee’s em-
powerment into the workplace, but for PM to bring the desired outcome there
are also other ‘ingredients’ that deserve attention.
PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT’S ROLE IN CREATING AN EMPOWERING CONTEXT
Referring back to the definition of employee’s empowerment as specified by
Conger and Kanungo (1998) that empowerment is the ‘removal of the power-
lessness’, the way PM brought empowerment can be traced as follows. Firstly,
PM as a part of soft HR practices is connected with the deliberately above-
average pay, availability of promotion ladders, intensive methods of communi-
cation, more training, etc. Thus companies adopting this particular style are
empowering their employees because they are removing the ‘powerlessness’ of
employees by investing more in them. For example, extensive downward and
upward communication, which is one of the main characteristic of PM, is seen
as empowering acts because it removes communication barriers. The ‘power-
lessness’ of the employees where they do not have voices in the working place
is being removed through the practice of PM. With PM the employees will be
involved in the decision-making, and they will be having more autonomy in
their work (Marchington 2001).
Secondly, employees show significantly positive responses to the implemen-
tation of various forms of PM such as the Team Briefing2, Quality Circles3, and
Employee Share Ownership Plan4 (see Marchington, 2001, a study of Em-
ployee Involvement, a different name for PM). From the Marchington survey it
2 Team briefing (a part of downward communication practices) refers to ‘the short
meeting with the team of workers based around common service area to cascade
information or managerial messages throughout the organization’ (Holden 2001:
570).
3 Quality Circle means ‘a small group of volunteers who are engaged in work and
who meets regularly to discuss and propose ways of improving working methods
or arrangements under a trained leader’ (Armstrong 2001: 789).
4 Employee Share Ownership Plan (ESOP) is ‘a program under which employees
regularly accumulate shares and may ultimately assume control of the company’
(http://www.wordnet.princeton.edu/per/web)
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3. CHRYSANT LILY KUSUMAWARDOYO
is indicated that employee wished the team briefing to continue at their place of
work (95%), quality circles (80%), and employee share ownership/ profit shar-
ing (85%). Although Marchington mainly shows that employees feel a positive
impact on their attitudes and commitment, it also shows how in this sense PM
is an empowering approach. For example, the team briefing practice can be
seen as an empowering act because it helps the employees in doing their job
and to have a clearer goal. The Ownership Plan can also be seen as empowering
since it provides both extrinsic and intrinsic motivations. It works as an extrin-
sic motivator in a way that it gives monetary or ownership reward for the em-
ployee. As a consequence, employees have the sense of belonging to the com-
pany (Kato 2003, Poutsma 2003).
PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: JUST ANOTHER NEW NAME?
On the other side of the coin, there is a pessimistic view of the viability of PM
in delivering empowerment. One argument is that though it looks good on pa-
per, the program is actually not being designed to offer opportunities for em-
ployers to gain or consolidate control over the broader environment in which
their work is located (Hyman and Mason 1995: 192). Another is that PM prac-
tices are ‘purposefully designed not to give workers a very significant role in
decision making but rather to secure or enhanced employee contribution to the
organization’ (Wilkinson 1998: 40 in Holden 2001). From this perspective, PM
is perceived only as the manager’s way to gain optimal use of the employees,
without any intention to empower them (Holden, 2001: 577-8). Thus according
to this discourse, PM is just an old practice with a new name.
If one wants to traced back the reason why this phenomenon happens, it
can be argued that it is the consequence of the nature of PM, which relies heav-
ily on the initiatives and commitment of managers (Marchington 2001: 238-41).
In most cases, managers are likely to have limited commitment in implementing
the scheme since if requires that they give up a portion of control. For example,
some managers were found to indeed be engaging employees in the decision-
making process, but at the same time limiting the scope of choices (Marching-
ton and Grugulis 2000, cited in Gould-Williams 2004: 78). This show how in
reality, PM can be merely a cosmetic practices, an artificial offer from the man-
agement:
Employee participation, in its diverse forms, is under threat as an increasingly im-
potent counter to management initiatives and strategies. Employees are increas-
ingly being left with management – inspired and –controlled involvement as their
main, or even sole, source of information, communication and action. In an in-
creasingly individualized and deregulated labour market, with global competitive-
ness acting as the prime motor for management practice, it seems likely that the
bulk of employees will be left with few resources either to query or to contest the
directions taken by management control despite the rhetoric of empowerment….’
(Hyman and Mason, 1995: 193).
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4. PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: A VIABLE APPROACH FOR EMPLOYEE’S EMPOWERMENT
Another problem relies on PM’ assumption that employee and employer
will share common interest (Marchington 2001, Hyman and Mason 1995: 25).
In reality, this is not always the case because what is seen as empowering from
the perspective of the managers may not be seen as empowering from the em-
ployees’ point of view. As pointed out by Hanold (1997: 204 in Holden 2001:
575), if power is not taken by those it is bestowed upon them, there is no em-
powerment. In other words, introducing a new form of involvement scheme
which is not part of the employees’ interest will not bring any effect for them.
On the contrary, if the employees see that it is a worthwhile process for them,
then the new initiatives is likely to be an empowering process.
THE WAY FORWARD
There are two distinct opinions about PM; first is the optimistic view that PM is
a good approach that indeed is viable to empower the employees, and the sec-
ond is the pessimistic view that says this approach is unviable mainly because it
does not intend to empower employees. Overall, I argue that PM is neither
good or bad per se, because it is neutral in nature. Under ideal conditions, it will
deliver the desired outcome: the empowerment of the employee. But I am also
certain that in the absence of these ideal conditions, it does not necessarily
mean that PM will then disempower the employee.
Suppose the claim that the ultimate goal of PM is merely to gain the optimal
use of employees is true. In the process of ‘optimizing’ the use of employees
through various forms of participation, however, there are potential forms of
indirect effects that are empowering the employees. Let us take an example
from the one of PM’ practices. To enable employees to participate more by
having multi-skills, PM provides intensive training for them. However, from
the perspectives of the ‘pessimistic discourses’ this multi-skilling process is usu-
ally interpreted as ‘a camouflage for “multi-tasking”’ (Ramaswamy and Schi-
phorst 2000: 665). It is seen as ‘work intensification in the name of empower-
ment’ (ibid). Although this might be true, I would argue that in the process of
‘multi-tasking’, there is a space where the employees might feel empowered.
This is because, being able to perform ‘multi-tasks’ means that they are now
able to have more responsibility toward tasks that previously, due to the limited
skills that they had, were beyond their responsibility. To have more skills that
enable them to have more responsibilities might be empowering for the em-
ployees. It might stimulate the feeling of how meaningful they are for the com-
pany, thus providing them intrinsic motivation. Therefore, training – be it
aimed at multi-skilling or multi-tasking – is something worthwhile and empow-
ering for the employees.
The lesson that can be drawn from this example is, one should not define
empowerment or disempowerment only based on the tangible product of the
process, like (for this particular case) having more tasks. Empowerment proc-
esses should also be measured by looking at the intangible outcomes, such as
the feeling of making an important contribution to the company, the feeling of
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5. CHRYSANT LILY KUSUMAWARDOYO
being in control, and many other intrinsic motivations. This reflects how PM is
working on psychological level, and this is indeed has an important role for the
employee’ empowerment. However, because it is intangible, this indirect effect
is rarely being acknowledged – making PM seem not to have any empowering
effect for the employees.
Therefore, I suggest that the discussion should go beyond whether PM is
indeed empowering employees or not. The focus should be on how to be aware
of conditions that should be taken into account for PM to work as expected.
This is because I believe that PM is a tool that works not within a vacuum but
in a very dynamic organizational setting. It deals with different people that may
have different interest, and works through different corporate and/or manage-
ment goals. Let us look at these elements one by one.
Firstly, in line with the HRM notion that the manager is a strategic actor, the
nature of PM is that the initiative comes from the management. Instead of
workers demanding to be given right to participate, in PM it is the managers
who allow the employees to become involved (Hyman and Mason, 1995: 25).
However, the thing that should not be forgotten is that managers are also hu-
man and may have a different interest. For instance, first line managers and
supervisors may not share same interest in the idea of PM. While for the first
line managers the interest may be to empower the employee, for the supervisor
it could be seen as something that is threatening their authority, since empow-
erment implies giving power from managers to employees. If introducing PM is
seen as something not beneficial for them, it is more likely that supervisors will
not show a commitment in implementing the scheme (Marchington 2001: 238).
Therefore, before being asked to initiate any form of PM scheme, managers
have to be ‘empowered’ first. It could be done by for example providing them
with necessary and relevant knowledge about the scheme, and by communicat-
ing the benefit of implementing such a scheme. Moreover, in addition to con-
sidering the interest of the managers, the interest of the employee should also
be the part of the picture. Participation should be made available to get the
views on what kind of involvement that the employees want or need. It should
be done before introducing a scheme of employee involvement, because as-
suming that employees will have the same interest as managers is risky. It may
lead to an introduction of a scheme that is not representing the interest of the
employee and thus, as a consequence, fails to create empowerment. It may also
lead to conflicting interest between the managers and the employee. To avoid
this, a more intense participation and two-ways of communication should be
ensured.
Secondly, often there are problems in the implementation of PM due to the
competing initiatives and goals within the organization. Marchington (2001:
239) points out how the multiplicity of different arrangement of PM can result
in different practices competing with each other. Power and departmental poli-
tics within organization can heavily influence the outcome of any initiatives,
leading to failure to continue an implementation. As an example, he shows that
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6. PARTICIPATIVE MANAGEMENT: A VIABLE APPROACH FOR EMPLOYEE’S EMPOWERMENT
there might be major tensions between a suggestion scheme that pays for em-
ployee ideas and a TQM initiative in which employees are expected to under-
take continuous improvement as part of their normal duties. Competing goals
like this may lead to the condition where employees are being trapped into dif-
ficult situation and as a consequence, the environment is not conducive for
growing the empowerment. Therefore, creating synergetic goals within the
company is crucial to avoid such situation.
CONCLUSION
By looking at the two different clusters of discourses about PM, there are at
least two important lessons that can be drawn. First is that PM should be seen
as neither empowering or disempowering. This essay has shown that even
though the main goal of PM may not be to empower the employees, in its
process, there are indirect effects that indeed create empowerment. Therefore,
if the ultimate goal of PM is not to empower employees, it can still bring em-
powerment. Empowerment should not be valued only in the tangible forms,
but also in intangible forms as well – which is equally important.
Second, rather than being easy to implement, PM is actually a complex ap-
proach that should be implemented carefully in order to avoid the possibility of
being trapped into the rhetoric. In order to locate in which particular area that
this scheme is unable to bring the desired outcome, PM should not be seen in a
vacuum but should be placed within the intersection of various interests of
people as well as competing goals within particular organization. PM must al-
ways be examined within its context. Thus, for PM practices to succeed in de-
livering employee empowerment, it needs to be placed in relation to other ele-
ments within the organizations, such as different interests and competing goals,
and these forces must be taken into account in the planning of new involve-
ment initiative.
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