Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior - Soltanieh ...

USE PARTICIPATION TO SHARE INFORMATION AND DISTRIBUTE KNOWLEDGE 447
Wagner, 1994 ), Wagner and Gooding discovered that participation correlated, on average,
.11 with performance, .11 with satisfaction, and .10 with acceptance (i.e. commitment).
Although a subsequent reanalysis of Wagner and Gooding ’s data appeared to contradict
their findings (Erez, Bloom, and Wells, 1996 ), an additional analysis showed the contradictory
interpretation to be invalid (Wagner and LePine, 1999 ). Other studies have produced
findings similar to and supportive of Wagner and Gooding ’s results (e.g. Locke, Feren,
McCaleb, Shaw, and Denny, 1980 ; Wagner, 1994 ). After considering the available evidence,
Locke, Alavi, and Wagner ( 1997 ) concluded that participation’s likely correlations
with performance and satisfaction are both on the order of .11. Changing levels of participation
(i.e. from direction to participation) therefore explain only about 1% of the concurrent
change in performance or satisfaction. This conclusion offers little general support
for the use of participation as a motivational technique in the workplace.
Exceptions: when is participation most likely to motivate?
Despite documenting participation’s limitation, in general, as a motivational tool, Wagner
and Gooding ( 1987 ) also discovered situational conditions under which participation might
have more substantial effects. In particular, their analysis suggested that participation is more
likely to be related to employee satisfaction when participation takes place in smaller groups – typically,
groups of 12 or fewer members. Implied by this finding is the possibility that participants are
unable to develop a sense of personal connection to or ownership of participatory outcomes
in larger group settings, due perhaps to the fact that many people share in the creation of
those outcomes, and thus each participant fails to derive satisfaction from participatory
processes or results. In small groups, however, participation and satisfaction are correlated
at the level of .25 on average, indicating that about 6% of the change in satisfaction can be
attributed to participation’s effects. The size of this relationship suggests that group size is an
important situational condition and that participation in small groups has limited, but nonetheless
noteworthy, utility as a practical means of stimulating workplace satisfaction.
Wagner and Gooding ( 1987 ) also reported that differences in task complexity have effects on
the strength of relationships between participation and both satisfaction and acceptance. In each relationship,
the effect is stronger when tasks are less complex, meaning more behaviorally
routine and less cognitively demanding. Suggested is the possibility that participation can
be used to enrich – make more challenging – otherwise oversimplified work. Participation’s
relationship with satisfaction is again somewhat modest, with an average correlation of .26
revealed in the presence of simple tasks, but its relationship with acceptance is more
substantial, as evidenced by an average correlation of .32 under simple task conditions.
Indicated by the latter finding is a fairly strong enrichment effect, in which increasing participation
by individuals who otherwise perform simple tasks explains just over 10% of the
corresponding increase in acceptance of the results of participatory processes.
PRIMARY CAUSAL MECHANISM: PARTICIPATION
DISSEMINATES INFORMATION
In contrast to the motivational mechanism ’s definition of participation as a process of
influence sharing, within the framework of the cognitive mechanism the focus is on participation
defined as a process of information sharing. From this perspective, participation’s effects