In the workplace, leaders put a significant amount of trust and have confidence in the team members. Successful leaders regularly look for differing points of view from team members and then use this information to make a decision. Participative leadership is of particular interest since it allows for shared responsibilities. The author has experienced working as a leader in the health care industry. A lot of the decision making in this industry is critical as decisions impact the health of people. These decisions should be made in collaboration with inputs from all team members in order to have proper and safe outcomes.

Participative Leadership Explained

This leadership style allows for team members to share their thoughts and ideas and is given an opportunity to impact decision making (Fatima, Majeed & Saeed, 2017). This leadership style is also a structured method that starts with the leader facilitating conversation in a meeting. The leader will typically provide the topic with information and necessary documents for the decision to be made. Next, the leader motivates the team members to share their thoughts. All this information is gathered for the leader in processing. Finally, the leader decides what is the best solution and then shares this with the team members.

Major Article Summary

According to the article by Chan (2019), there is a positive correlation between participative leadership style with work engagement and job satisfaction. This article was very intriguing in discussing participative leadership. The article first defines this leadership style, which is to allow team members to share in the decision making and for leaders to be supportive. The author sets forth to complete a study to examine the effect of participative leadership on employees’ job satisfaction. The study ultimately wants to have value added to this leadership theory. Firstly, the study wants to show how participative style effects team members work attitudes. Then, it wants to go in depth towards the inner workings of this relationship between this leadership style, and team members work attitudes. Finally, the study wants to develop further the level of fun experienced by team members and how this effects workplace engagement. These are some key areas that can assist any organization in deciding leadership styles.

This study on the participative style used the understanding that team members that are satisfied with the workplace have more fun (Chan, 2019). The measures used in this study included – participative leadership, work engagement, level of fun experienced, and job satisfaction. The study tested four hypotheses. The study concluded that this leadership style encourages team members to engage in the workplace. It enhances and raises the levels of both engagement and job satisfaction. The study also displayed team members that have more fun at work are more engaged. This results in a higher level of job satisfaction. The intriguing result was about team members who have more fun at work participate at a higher level in decision making and work-related tasks. 

Discussion

As with any leadership style, there its advantages as well as its shortcomings. The team members have increased engagement as they are involved in decision making (Fatima, Majeed & Saeed, 2017). This also makes them feel valued. The organization is a winner as team members are more committed, resulting in achieving its goals. The other benefit to this leadership style is that the workplace functions well even without the leader been there. This leadership style is also not beneficial to all situations or organizations. In situations where decision making has to be done quickly, this style would be a failure. Also, some team members may feel the pressure of just agreeing with the majority in order not to be called out. This leadership style is not always appropriate as it can create indecisiveness and cause inefficiencies. An essential component for participative leadership to be successful is for the leader to build a team of experienced and cooperative team members. This will foster a team friendly approach that will enable team members to support the group and its decisions.

In the previous article discussed by Chan (2019), the study concluded that participative leadership effects team members engage in a positive way amongst other findings. Eva, Newman, Miao, Cooper & Herbert (2019) also conducted a study involving a participative leadership style. These authors wanted to measure the job performance of team members (including top management) with relations to the CEO using this style of leadership. It concluded that using this style of leadership does affect positively job performance. Another interesting article by Lam, Huang & Chan (2015), used participative leadership to conduct a study. The purpose of this study was to measure the relationship between participative leadership and team member performance depending on leaders sharing of information. The results showed that the more information the leaders shared, the higher the job performance of the team members.

The third article by Bouwmans, Runhaar, Wesselink & Mulder (2017) conducted a study to explore the mediating roles of this leadership theory on decision making, team commitment amongst a few other hypotheses. The results of the study included that decision making was positively correlated with team commitment. It also concluded that it had a positive association with task interdependence. The final article researched for this posting about participative leadership theory was written by Lythreatis, Mostafa & Wang (2019). The authors wanted to study the relationship between leadership theory and organizational identification. This was discussed as one of the advantages of this style earlier. The results of the study showed that there is a positive correlation between using this leadership style and positive internal perception from team members. This makes them feel valued.

References

Bouwmans, M., Runhaar, P., Wesselink, R., & Mulder, M. (2017). Fostering teachers' team learning: An interplay between transformational leadership and participative decision-making? Teaching and Teacher Education, 65, 71-80. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2017.03.010 Chan, S. C. H. (2019). Participative leadership and job satisfaction. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 40(3), 319-333. doi:10.1108/LODJ-06-2018-0215

Eva, N., Newman, A., Miao, Q., Cooper, B., & Herbert, K. (2019). Chief executive officer participative leadership and the performance of new venture teams. International Small Business Journal: Researching Entrepreneurship, 37(1), 69-88. doi:10.1177/0266242618808558

Fatima,T., Majeed, M., & Saeed, I. (2017). Does participative leadership promote innovative work behavior: The moderated mediation model. Business & Economic Review, 9(4), 141-158. doi:10.22547/BER/9.4.7

Lam, C. K., Huang, X., & Chan, S. C. H. (2015). The threshold effect of participative leadership and the role of leader information sharing. Academy of Management Journal, 58(3), 836-855. doi:10.5465/amj.2013.0427

Lythreatis, S., Mostafa, A. M. S., & Wang, X. (2019). Participative leadership and organizational identification in SMEs in the MENA region: Testing the roles of CSR perceptions and pride in membership. Journal of Business Ethics, 156(3), 635-650. doi:10.1007/s10551-017-3557-8