Employee Participation

TQM is a management philosophy that focuses on improving the quality of a company's products and services and stresses that all company operations should be oriented toward this goal. Developed by a number of American consultants, including W. Edwards Deming, the concept was embraced by the Japanese and partially credited with turning around that country's post-World War II economy. Since the early 1980s TQM practices have spread rapidly throughout Western industry. In the last ten years, TQM has won many converts in the federal government as well. As David Carnevale describes it, "At a 1990 conference sponsored by the American Society of Public Administration (ASPA), every panel on quality improvement was packed. There was almost an evangelical fervor in the air" (88).

With TQM, the inputs and involvement of all employees in the decision-making process are deemed necessary to improve production efficiency and quality. Thus it becomes necessary to decentralize authority in order to motivate workers. Work teams are created and workers are given the responsibility and authority to discover and

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immediately. For TQM programs to be effective in federal government, union and management must overcome existing barriers to cooperation. President Bill Clinton has made progress in this area by establishing the National Partnership Council to help encourage cooperative ventures. Several government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Labor, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration have used quality improvement teams to generate improvements in agency operations (Carnevale 86). Increased employee participation is also being used by the federal government to help create a more culturally diverse workforce. Approaches like affirmative action and outreach programs have succeeded in bringing more women and minorities into the ranks. With recent changes in federal law, management can even use outside commercial recruiters or directly recruit, examine, and hire staff to meet equal opportunity objectives (National Performance Review 5). However, the upward mobility of women and minorities has, for the most part, not met expectations. Managers now realize that merely bringing women and minorities into an organization is only solving half the problem: "By solving only
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Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)