Organizational Policies and Procedures for Worker Involvement

Discuss the chart on page 238 and draw a line where worker involvement is impractical or improper. Then, discuss your views for establishing participatory and democratic workplaces.

The chart on page 238 of Organizational Communication by Eisenberg, Goodall, and Trethewey shows the empowerment continuum of work teams. The X-axis is the percentage of responsibility and authority of the team and the Y-axis is the degree of empowerment. The greater the percentage of responsibility and authority a team has, the greater the degree of empowerment.

Lower points on the chart are activities such as housekeeping, training one another, quality responsibilities, managing suppliers, and many other tasks. A team of workers can easily accomplish these tasks. A head manager does not need to be in charge of these smaller responsibilities. In addition, there are higher levels of work team responsibility and authority. These tasks are things such as making compensation decisions, disciplinary process, budgeting, and equipment purchase. Some companies allow teams to manage these high responsibility tasks in addition to the lower level responsibility tasks. However, worker involvement is not always the most efficient, fair, or practical way to run a business.

An imaginary line is present on the chart where worker involvement is no longer proper. At a certain point, too much team responsibility makes the company impractical. The division point between team decisions and a boss’s decisions needs to be between vacation scheduling and choosing team leaders. After choosing team leaders, one or two powerful people need to make the decisions rather then an entire team. Having one leader makes for a more efficient workplace.

If all employees of a company were in charge of making disciplinary decisions, imagine how chaotic it would be to have everyone disciplining one of their coworkers. What if everyone was able to make compensation decisions, or buy whatever new equipment they wanted? The company would spend more time having its workers make these decisions then time they were actually working. A manager, supervisor, or boss needs to present to take care of the higher responsibility jobs and allow the teams to make smaller decisions.

The reason that workers cannot always make decisions in the team structure is that when there are lots of people on a team, people work unequal amounts. For example, if there were twenty employees on a team, they would not all put in exactly the same amount of effort into their decisions. A leader that was more dedicated to the company would have to be present to take over the workers that do not want to put in any effort. This is not fair for the entire team.

In addition to workers putting unequal amounts of effort into their job, only one individual should do some tasks. When a boss makes the decision to discipline an employee for their actions, it is simple and does not involve all the employees. It is just more efficient to have one decision maker for the higher levels of responsibility. If workers are afraid that having one boss make important decisions will exclude them from the team worker environment, perhaps the employees could help in other ways. It would be possible for employees to help create the disciplinary handbook or help with the budget in advance. That way when a situation comes up and the boss needs to consult the handbook, or whatever other decisions might be necessary, the employees had helped make those rules.

Workplace democracy focuses on employee participation in decision making for an improved outcome. A company can do this by making everyone an owner, making the management integrated into the workplace, having quality information widely distributed, and making the structure solid from the bottom up. By having these four qualities, worker participation increases as well. However, this is not always a practical way of viewing a company.

When worker participation and worker democracy are the main goal of a company, it leads to inefficiency and the wasting of time. This inefficiency can occur when too many employees are trying to make decisions on the same thing. Sometimes it is better to have a select few, or even one, employee make difficult decisions. This way the other employees can focus on accomplishing other tasks. Another reason that worker participation does not always work is that it looses its appeal. Initially the idea of being completely involved in the decision making process might seem ideal, but over time the spontaneity is gone and workers no longer like the involvement.

Though the idea of worker involvement and a workplace democracy is good, carrying out these plans in an efficient, spontaneous, passionate way is often difficult. The terms worker and involvement and workplace democracy are oftentimes unrealistic goals of a company. A better plan is to have employees help to make the handbooks, vote on new machinery, and work on the budget so that they are involved. After their input and voting occurs, one manager of boss takes care of the details of these ideas. This way everyone can be efficient in his or her own realm of the work environment.