saturs - rpiva

participate actively in managing. But as one can suppose – not every employee wants to do it,
just as not every manager is willing to share his power with the employees on the lower levels
of the organizational hierarchy, even despite the benefits that it could bring.
Participative orientation is the concept that helps us to explain why only some of the
employees are willing to have influence on organizational reality and to participate in
management and why only some of the managers want to share their power with their
subordinates. Participative orientation, is one out of three possible attitudes towards an
organization that an individual can take (Żmuda, Prokopowicz, & Stocki, 2008) and just as
the remaining two - totalistic and individualistic orientations – it manifests itself as a kind of
behavioral tendency. According to the Żmuda et al. (2008), the totalistic orientation is
displayed in the passive reactivity to the actions of other people. A person with totalistic
orientation aims at accomplishing the organizational goals and prefers them to his or her
personal aspirations. The main reasons to do it are specific circumstances and the
consequences of doing or not doing it rather than his / her own will. The result of having such
an external motivation to take actions within organization is of course the fact, that the
employee’s individual engagement in broadening the common good is very changeable. An
employee with the extreme individualistic orientation in turn tends to prefer his own, personal
goals rather than the organizational ones and tends to direct as many of his or her own actions
as it is possible to accomplish his or her personal aims. Such people, although active within an
organization, tends to isolate themselves, as their actions are in a way naturally directed
against the whole organizational community (Żmuda, 2008).
By comparison to these two attitudes, participative orientation can be described as a
kind of tendency to seek permanently the compromise between the employee’s individual
goals and the organizational ones. However, such a definition concerns only one aspect of the
participative orientation concept – behavioral one. Apart from that also the cognitive aspect of
participative orientation is distinguished (Żmuda, Prokopowicz, & Stocki, 2008). The authors
defined it as a set of cognitive representations. As one can suppose – all of the three
orientations described above are based on the specific content of the employee’s mental
structures, as in fact each behavioral pattern that a man can display is to a large extent a
consequence of the individual’s cognitive representations, schemas or mental models. What
distinguishes all of them from each other is the specific content of these mental
representations. In case of participative representations – they can be described in detail by
reference to a few following theories.
To begin with, the concept of participative orientation can be anchored in theory of
participation introduced by Karol Wojtyla in his philosophical work entitled “The Acting
Person” (1985). Considering the concept of participation Wojtyla defines it as a “person’s
transcendence in the action, when the action is performed together with others” (p.333).
According to this view, the willingness to participate stems from two main factors - from
perceiving other people in an organization as free human beings, able to take responsibility
for all their actions and the same time – it stems from regarding one’s own actions within an
organization as a way to transcendence oneself. In other words, in order to participate, a man
must have shaped such a content of his cognitive schema of other employees, their actions
and of his or her own actions within the organization.
Other theories or strands that Stocki et al. (2008) raise when describing the content of
the mental structures that constitute the participative orientation are more strongly settled in
today’s management. Among them, there is McGregor’s Y Theory (1960/2006), Maslow’s
(1998/2005) approach towards organizational issues and Positive Organizational Scholarship
(Cameron, Dutton & Quinn, 2003). McGregor’s Y Theory recognizes positive characteristic
of an employee and assumes that every employee cherish the work, is willing to participate,
has a self-control and a need of being creative. It considers employees as hardworking,
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