STAFF PARTICIPATION IN ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION-MAKING - AN EMPIRICAL-STUDY

There is a considerable amount of literature advocating participatory forms of decision-making in human service organizations. There is, however, little empirical research documenting the extent to which participatory decision-making is currently practiced in social service or health care settings. The author reviews key issues in conceptualizing participatory decision-making, describes the development of a scale designed to measure the level of staff participation in organizational decisions common to human service agencies, and reports the findings of a study of staff participation in organizational decision-making in a stratified random sample of fifteen planned parenthood Affiliates.