Branch of Organizational Design That I Am

¶ … branch of organizational design that I am going to investigate is participative management, which was an idea developed by Likert in the 1960s based on his observations of changes in the management techniques at the time.

Participative management was explained by Renis Likert. At the University of Michigan, he started Michigan Survey Research Center. In 1961 he published his New Patterns of Management that described participative management. He would elaborate on this theory quite a bit in later books, especially in 1966 and 1967. He had noticed that there was a new style of management that had arisen that was different from the old, authoritative style. Likert would then outlined four different types of participative management -- exploitive authoritative, benevolent authoritative, consultative, and participative group systems.

2b.

At the time, Likert's work was received well. He was successful in explaining a phenomenon that existed in the business world, so while some might have been skeptical, most realized that Likert was describing the reality of management at the time. Through the 1950s and 60s, Likert had built up connections in industry, and because of this his work was fairly well-known and it was fairly well-received. There were some funding issues that would eventually be resolved, but on the whole Likert's work was successful, because it was understood by industry and this gave it credibility. Resistance was not particularly strong. Marchant (1971) notes that participative management has significant potential to improve the management at libraries, as an example of the rapid acceptance of Likert's ideas.

There has been some evidence provided that there are positive outcomes from participative management styles -- for example increased job satisfaction (Kim, 2002) -- and that has helped participative management to become even more popular since it was first identified. The recent research shows that Likert's ideas are holding up and remain relevant in the study of OD today.

2c.

Likert basically described a series of management typologies, and it is important to understand these because different managers have different styles. In some companies, specific styles are favored over others. The reason for this is that some styles are better than others for achieving specific objectives. For example, a company that fosters innovation in work teams is likely to work better with a more participative management style than an authoritarian style. Conversely, there are many companies with highly-routinized processes that actually work better with one of the authoritarian management styles.