Managing Participation in Organizational Decisions

Involving subordinates in the process of making organizational decisions is widely thought to be helpful in improving the quality of decisions and also increasing the "ownership " of those decisions. However, participation also can have dysfunctional or even counterproductive effects. In a school system, the school principal or superintendent who is interested in utilizing participative decision making must have an accurate perception of when the staff should or should not be involved. To facilitate this, the authors suggest a three-part schema for classifying problems as viewed by subordinates: the Zone of Indif-ference, Zone of Ambivalence, and Zone of Sensitivity. Based upon these con-cepts, the authors developed and tested a technique for assessing the views of school faculty members as a source of data to guide principals and superin-tendents in deciding whom to involve in dealing with what problems. The tech-nique is broadly applicable to other types of organizations as well. The participation of teachers in making decisions is highly valued as an ideal in educational administration. In part, this stems from the widely shared view in America that the schools should be models of humanitarian, partici-patory group effort. Thus, many still invoke the political concept of &dquo;demo-cratic administration&dquo; in describing desirable administrative style. There is a sounder reason for involving teachers in decision making, however. In short, it is to improve the quality of the decisions that the school makes and thus improve the effectiveness of the school in achieving its goals. The authors gratefully acknowledge the cooperation and support of the faculty and administration of the Mt. Pleasant (Pennsylvania) Area High School in conduct-ing the study on which this article is based. We are especially indebted to Super