Week 18 - Communication and Involvement

Employee participation is where organisations will offer the chance for employees to have an opinion in decisions.

This shares a connection with the democratic leadership style where you can have a say. The chief executive or the head of the business may still make the final decision. The employees get some authority to make decisions in the work place without having to run it past the manager which is what they call empowerment.

One of the main ways in which employees are now getting involved in helping with decision making and managers are allowing them to get involved is by the use of social networking site such as Facebook and MySpace. These have their advantages and disadvantages. Some advantages are that they can easily be read by managers because they are easily accessible and they can give the business a wide variety of suggestions of what decisions to make.

A disadvantage on the other hand is that people outside the organisation may be able to see these comments and decisions that are being made and therefore competition may be able to see what the business is planning. This can be avoided by privacy settings and such but there may still be other problems occurring if they make their planning so public.