Participative Management: Implementing Empowerment

Greg Turko is a policy analyst at the Ontario Ministry of Colleges and
Universities.

The terms “empowerment” and “participative management”—along
with “client focused” and the unintelligible “total quality”
(which, one presumes, is in contrast to the oxymoron “partial
quality”)—are all phrases and concepts that currently enjoy a high
profile in many management circles.

Plunkett and Fourier are management consultants who have focused on
participative management—which, in their terms, can lead to employee
empowerment. In the best management seminar fashion, they have selected
a central case study (the Imperial Oil petrochemical plant in Sarnia),
along with a number of usually anonymous bad examples. Anyone who has
ever dealt with a shipping department will enjoy, or despair over, the
anecdote about the shipping department that measured performance in
terms of how long it took the goods to arrive rather than when the goods
were shipped. Thus, goods that were, for example, shipped ten days late,
but that arrived within the allotted two days for transportation, were
deemed to be “on time.”

There is a considerable amount of detail provided, right down to do’s
and don’ts, empowerment models, vision statements, how to run
effective meetings, and so on. In short, this is a well-documented and
easy-to-follow “how-to” manual of great interest to anyone
considering implementing a participative management-employee empowerment
approach.

This book is emphatically not an explanation or a discussion of what
participative management-empowerment actually is, except insofar as the
nature of the concepts becomes evident indirectly in the course of the
discussion provided. In other words, this is a book for the
participative management-empowerment faithful, rather than for anyone
who is not au courant with, or skeptical of, the concepts.