Advantages
Motivation: Participation creates a positive work environment. Employees may have the chance to show creativity and analytical ability. These opportunities make them more motivated.
Increases Goodwill: Participation helps to build a good relationship between management and employees. It increases employee’s efficiency and they can produce quality products and services for the customers. A good working condition is available at work. All this increases the goodwill of the organization.
Work Enthusiasm: The manager may accept the employee’s idea or not. When their ideas are accepted they feel proud and become more enthusiastic about their work. When management does not accept their ideas and shows the logic behind refusal work enthusiasm will not reduce.
Better operations: Organizations will run better if staffs are more loyal, feel needed, and wanted. They feel that they are respected, and their opinions count. If management proactively seeks their input into decision-making, decisions tend to be better when they can call on a wider range of knowledge, information, and experience.
Positive work environment: Mangers listen to staff, ask their opinions, and take them seriously. For these employees consider themselves a part of the organization. This results in a positive environment in the workplace.
Increases creativity and innovation: Creativity and Motivation are two important benefits of participative management. By allowing and diverse group of employees to have input into decisions, the organization benefits from the synergy that comes from a wider choice of options. When all employees, instead of just managers or executives, are given the opportunity to participate, the chances are increased that a valid and unique idea will be suggested.
Accept of Decision: Employees accept any kind of decision without showing an argument. Because management asks their suggestions and proposal while making a decision. As they participate in the decision process so workers accept the decision and work to implement it.
Increase trust: Trust is an important factor in leadership. Participatory approaches usually mean that decision making is more transparent. That, in turn, increases the trust of the staff, and the leadership of the manager is increased. And transparency itself tins an added benefit to this approach.
Effective decision: Decision is the process of selecting the best alternative. For a single problem, different people may give different solutions, even thousands of solutions. So participation facilitates the decision process.
Increase capacity & influence of management: Participation creates mutual faith, understanding, and cooperation. So, employees hardly disagree with the manager’s decisions. It indicates that the manager can easily influence the employees to implement various decisions.
Less cost and time: There are a few costs, however, to obtaining participatory input. A participatory decision is a group decision. So, less time is required to implement it. And the cost of participation is less than its benefit in case of successful participation.
Disadvantages
Communication Complexity
More lines of communication and the potential for inconsistent decision making are disadvantages with employee involvement systems. When more employees have input and decision-making ability, more communication is necessary to make certain that decisions are consistent across the organization. This consistency is critical to brand recognition and consistency. Managers may have a hard time monitoring decisions and activities with employee involvement to protect against negative consequences and to restrict the potential for chaos.
Manager-Employee Boundary
One potential challenge of encouraging employee involvement is the risk that the line of distinction between the management level and employee level becomes blurred. Though managers may value employee involvement, a disciplined structure with clear reporting lines have long been vital to stability in organizations. Allowing employees to share ideas and make decisions without having them push the envelope and try to take on responsibilities that are reserved for management levels is a real risk.
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