Consultative decision making can be used in all matters and is implicitly or explicitly related to a wide range of topics concerning team effectiveness, organizational culture and participatory processes.

It is self-evident that “…informed decision making at all levels of a company hierarchy is the key to business success. Sound management strategy and process is underpinned by decision-based solutions that make effective use of the vast array of information available to the organization.” ¹  Gaining effective access to this vast array of information, finding a way to integrate and synthesize it, using it for innovative and creative solutions, is the challenge of consultative decision making.

Organizational culture is the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.² A four year study of –ten firms in each of 20 industries, carried out by Kotter and Heskett of Harvard Business School, found that firms with a strong adaptive culture based on shared values, outperformed firms with rigid or weak cultures by a significant margin. ³ Strong adaptive cultures emphasize leadership development and employee fulfillment. There are many aspects to employee fulfillment. They include how employees feel about the degree to which their work environment is one of cooperation, team work, open communication and appreciation. ⁴ Consultative decision making creates the framework for cooperation and unity. Conversely, not employing consultative decision making reduces the prospects for employee fulfillment as the individuals involved would feel that their contribution was not valued, that cooperation is only superficial and that the leadership style is authoritarian.

Management by Values (MBV), is emerging as a strategic leadership tool. Management by Instructions (MBI) and Management by Objectives (MBO) today give notoriously inadequate results. ⁵ In MBV the co-workers take on responsibility for the development of the whole organization - including objectives, strategy and vision. The focus is on creating.

Participation is a term that refers to the extent to which people have input into and control over the decision-making processes that directly impact them. It refers to a fundamental change not only in the quantity, but especially the quality, of stakeholder participation. Any organization or company looking to increase participatory processes needs to define its decision making method to achieve this objective. If, in a group setting, personal styles of competition, control and manipulation are exhibited, such behavior by definition destroys the desired results of participation. Without consultative decision making, or something that approximates it, it is hard to see how participatory processes can go beyond rhetoric and successfully unite groups behind a common vision and decision.

Hierarchical, archaic organizational structures and decision-making processes—perfectly suited for the old industrial era—essentially remain the norm. There is, in brief, a growing incongruity between this organizational status quo and the new underlying value changes and social conditions that are fueling the demands for participation. In response, organizations will have to adapt by becoming less centralized and more flexible, horizontal, collaborative and transparent. ⁶

The creation of “self-managed,” “self-directed,” and “self-organizing” groups and teams are other increasingly considered ways of moving away from traditional top-down bureaucratic organizational structures. All encourage participation by employees. Larry Miller  describes the key ingredients of high-performance organizations. The organization of people, particularly at the first level, is designed around the work into small work groups, teams, with a high degree of self-management (Figure 1). High performance organizations shift from individual decisions to team decisions. The process of team problem solving, reaching consensus, requires a major change in attitude and perspective. For some, Miller emphasizes, this transition requires years. This consultation knowledge centre has, as its objective, support to the transition process.

¹  www.sopra.com
²  Charles W. L. Hill, Gareth R. Jones, Strategic Management, Fifth Edition, 2001 Houghton Mifflin, MeansBusiness, Inc.
³  John Kotter and James Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance, Free Press, 1992
⁴  Ray Adler, Cultural Capital: The New Frontier of Competitive Advantage, President & CEO of Bank Training International, Inc., Vista, CA. 2005.
⁵  Shimon L. Dolan and Salvador Garcia, Managing By Values In The Next Milenium: Cultural Redesign for Strategic Organizational Change; Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2000
⁶  Gregory D. Saxton, The Rise of Participatory Society; State University of New York, 2004.

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