The Ethical Superiority and Inevitability of Participatory Management as an Organizational System

During the heady revolutionary days of the 1960s, Slater and Bennis (Slater, P. E., W. G. Bennis. 1964. Democracy is inevitable. Harvard Bus. Rev. 42 (2) 51--59.) declared the inevitability of democracy at the workplace. Twenty-five years later, in a retrospection of that article, the authors claimed that they were right (Slater and Bennis [Slater, P. E., W. G. Bennis. 1990. Democracy is inevitable. Harvard Bus. Rev. 68 (5) 167--176.]). Unfortunately, the data do not support their claim (Lawler et al. [Lawler, E. E., S. A. Mohrman, G. E. Ledford. 1992. Employee Involvement and Total Quality Management . Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco.]). Nonetheless, workplace democracy is inevitable.This article argues in favor of the inevitability of participatory management, one form of workplace democracy, on the basis of its coherence to the social philosophical assumptions about human nature that underlie the forms of political arrangements (democracy) and economic arrangements (mixed economy) in the United States. These communitarian philosophical assumptions have been thoroughly argued in the political science and economic literature to be ethically superior to other sets of social philosophical assumptions that underlie authoritarianism and libertarianism. Currently, organization theory is approximately 200 years behind this literature. Persons who experience significant benefits as a result of the central position of “liberty” in the social philosophical assumptions of democracy and capitalism tend to design organizational systems that significantly restrict the liberty of their employees.The current push for more democratic features is coming from organization theorists doing work on corporate culture, total quality management, gainsharing, and other systems of management that encourage decentralization, and from business ethics scholars doing work on the societal accountability of organizations. The very slow rate of evolution to workplace democracy is primarily attributed to the central role of the power elite. Whereas the American political and economic revolutionaries came from within the power elite of their times that is not yet the case for workplace democracy advocates.