of the organization as well as to the culture of the country. The success of participative management in Japanese organizations has forced other countries including the United States to consider adaptation of participative management. In a typical American organization, the department head, the division manager, and the president typically assume the decision making role. However, recently, some organizations have adopted participative management in which all of the members of a department reach consensus on what decision to adopt. Research in Europe and the United States over the past twenty years has shown that the evidence strongly suggests that a consensus approach yields more creative decisions and more effective implementation than does individual decision making.
Shuster (1988, p. 65) hypothesized that superior financial performance is the effect of good management communication. Shuster noted that the reverse is an equally plausible hypothesis, however, cited actual experience where the first hypothesis occurs more frequently. For example, IBM and Donnelly Mirrors are but two U.S. companies that have applied effective management communication techniques and subsequently achieved superior financial performance. Other researchers have addressed similar situations where management communication techniques were utilized to achieve desired objectives.
Katz studied variations in the type of business information employers provided to employees as a result of economic factors. For example, Katz found that during "good" economic times information was supplied to employees to increase morale and subsequently increase productivity and profits; during "difficult" economic times information was supplied to obtain wage concessions; firms with benefits such as gain sharing and profit sharing provided information to increase productivity and profits. Thus Katz theorized that "providing information to employees who work for high...