physical, financial, and human resource inputs (Miles and McCloskey, 1993, pp. 40 45).
A concern with organizational performance, thus, is one of the more significant of the problems that confront organizational managers in the last decade of the twentieth century (Hakim, 1993, pp. 46 49). The costs to an organization of sub standard
performance involve profit deterioration, the diversion of financial and human resources from production to diagnostic and corrective actions, and the introduction of discontinuity into organizational activities, just to enumerate a few (De Long and Summers, 1992, pp. 5 29).
Lagging productivity growth affects the ability of firms to compete effectively in both domestic and international markets. How best to attain productivity improvement, however, is an issue of both concern and dispute. With respect to human resource inputs, one concern is the management style that is likely to yield the most productive outcomes. Most contemporary theorists tend to favor a participative style, although there are dissenters from this position, and there are numerous examples of highly productive organizations where the management style is not highly participative in character. Participation in the context of organizational management means permitting organizational members other than senior managers make some of the important organizational decisions (Barner, 1994, pp. 33 36).
Decision making in organizations has been described as a process of behavior with the economic model (or total rationality) at one extreme, and with the social model (or complete irrationality) at the other extreme (Kimberly and Rottman, 1987, pp. 596 619). This description implies that only irrational decision making accords human values precedence over economic values. In the organizational environments of the 1990s, leaders must find some middle ground between these extremes, for it is evident that neither set of va...