Choosing an Involvement Strategy

The most prevalent approach to designing work organizations calls for such features as hierarchical decision making, simple repetitive jobs at the lowest level, and rewards based on carefully measured individual job performance. But this "control" approach appears to be losing favor. Numerous articles and books have recently argued that work organizations need to move toward an "involvement" or "commitment" approach to the design and management of work organizations.' The advantages of the involvement approach are said to include higher quality products and services, less absenteeism, less turnover, better decision making, and better problem solving in short, greater organizational effectiveness.2 Careful examination of the suggested ways to increase involvement reveals not one but at least three approaches to managing organizations. All three encourage employee participation in decision making. These three approaches, however, have different histories, advocates, advantages, and disadvantages. An organization interested in adopting an involvement-oriented approach needs to be aware of the differences among these approaches and strategically choose the approach that is best for it. The three approaches to involvement are (1) parallel suggestion involvement, (2) job involvement, and (3) high involvement. They differ in the degree to which they direct that four key features should be moved to the lowest level of an organization. Briefly, the features are: (1) information about the performance of the organization, (2) rewards that are based on the performance of the organization, (3) knowledge that enables employees to understand and contribute to organizational performance, and (4) power to make decisions that influence organizational direction and performance. Information, rewards, knowledge, and power are the central issues for all organizations. How they are positioned in an organization determines the core management style of the organization. When they are concentrated at the top, traditional control-oriented management exists; when they are moved downward, some form of participative management is being practiced. The parallel suggestion approach does the least to move power, knowledge, information, and rewards downward, while the high involvement approach does the most. Because they position power, information, knowledge, and rewards differently, these approaches tend to fit different situations and to produce different results. It is not that one is always better than another, but that they are different and, to some degree, competing. Let us consider how these three approaches operate, and the results they produce. Once we have reviewed them, we can discuss when and how they are best used.