Increased employee participation is an area of significant work change that has occurred in federal government service in the last ten years. Increased participation positively influences organizational achievement. The federal government has used two strategies to accomplish this objective: total quality management programs (TQM) and the management of cultural diversity.
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 implement improved work procedures. No longer are managers employed purely to supervise workers and make sure they are doing the job. Each team assumes the supervisory burden and this results in a major savings of bureaucratic costs.
Several significant constraints exist to implementing TQM in the federal government. First, federal leadership is largely committed to the traditional hierarchical structure: "The federal government has over 280,000 person...