Abstract:
Despite common belief that greater worker participation in industry
will increase productivity and worker job satisfaction, the empirical
evidence has been most contradictory. Most theorists now belief that
the
degree of participation should depend on the particular problem
facing the leader.
For the
practicing manager one -problem has been identification of the
situation and subsequent selection of a appropriate decision method.
One answer to this problem is the Vroom and Yetton Model which
gives explicit directions to the leader as to how to identify the problem
and select
the appropriate decision method. The first objective of this
research was to examine
the extemal validity of that' model.
A measure was
also obtained of the leader's- preference for participation
and this was compared to the dependent variables of ñrm productivity
and worker satisfactionwith supervision. The sites chosen for
the research were 47, owner-operated, small, nonuniorised,
franchised rms, where the leader had the'-power and
authority toreffect organisational outcomes. In these sites, there' was.
relatively high control over the technology employed, tasks performed,
number of levels of hierarchy, and the extemal environments.
It was found that
those leaders who had high agreement with the Vroom
and Yetton model had higher productivity and workers with higher
satisfaction with supervision than those leaderslow in agreement withe,
the model.
On the other hand, those leaders with a high preference for participation
had workers with lower satisfaction with supervision than leaders with
low preference for participation. No correlation was found between
the leaders' preference for participation and the rms productivity.
These findings give strong support for the Vroom and Yetton model,
but raise the
question of why some leaders should follow the model
without having had any training in it.
