Participatory management

Participatory management is the practice of empowering members of a group, such as the employees of a company or the citizens of a community, to take part in organizational decision making. It is offered as an alternative to traditional vertical management structures, which the account holds to be less effective as participants lose interest when their effort and opinion go unrecognised. The practice grew out of the human relations movement of the 1920s and rests on principles from management and organization research, most notably the Hawthorne Experiments and the Hawthorne effect. Group leaders keep final decision-making authority, but participants are encouraged to voice their views, and in the workplace the idea is sometimes called industrial democracy. It was revived in the 1990s through organizational learning practices promoted by clients and students of Peter Senge, and it has been applied in public administration, urban planning and public policy.