NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Workplace democracy

Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal, and so on) to the workplace. A voting system is a means of choosing between a number of options, based on the input of a number of voters. ... Debate (North American English) or debating (British English) is a formal method of interactive and position representational argument. ... The principles of democratic structuring were defined by ((Jo Freeman]] in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, 1970, Berkeley Journal of Sociology. ... In United States law, adopted from British law, due process (more fully due process of law) is the principle that the government must normally respect all of a persons legal rights instead of just some or most of those legal rights when the government deprives a person of life... An adversarial process is one that sets up a specific and focused conflict, typically with rewards for prevailing, often in the form of a game. ... For the IBM collaboration software product, see IBM Workplace. ...

It usually involves or requires more use of lateral methods like arbitration when workplace disputes arise, but these are often carried out far more efficiently than the high-overhead methods common in undemocratic workplaces.^{[citation needed]} Arbitration is a legal technique for the resolution of disputes outside the courts, wherein the parties to a dispute refer it to one or more persons (the arbitrators or arbitral tribunal), by whose decision (the award) they agree to be bound. ...

1 History
2 Current approaches
3 versus Taylorism
4 Advantages and disadvantages
5 Not always applicable
6 See also
- 6.1 External links

History

Workplace democracy has a long history and arguably is much more basic and common to human work organization than is hierarchy.^{[citation needed]}

Associated with ideologies

These methods are often seen as associated with trade unions or syndicalism (or more lately eco-syndicalism), or in extreme forms anarcho-syndicalism. A trade union or labor union is a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment. ... Syndicalism refers to a set of ideas, movements, and tendencies which share the avowed aim of transforming capitalist society through action by the working class on the industrial front. ... Green syndicalism is the philosophy of the green guild or sustainable trades movement. ... Anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of anarchism which focuses on the labour movement. ...

Most unions have democratic structures at least for selecting the leader, and sometimes these are seen as providing the only democratic aspects of work. However, unions are not everywhere, and not every workplace that lacks a union lacks democracy, and not every workplace that has a union necessarily has a democratic way to resolve disputes.

However, some unions have historically been more committed to it than others. The Industrial Workers of the World pioneered the archetypal workplace democracy model, the Wobbly Shop, in which recallable delegates were elected by workers, and other norms of grassroots democracy were applied. This is still used in some organizations, notably Semco and in the software industry. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or the Wobblies) is an international union currently headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. At its peak in 1923 the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. ... For other meanings, see Grass roots (disambiguation). ... Ricardo Semler (born 1959 in SÃ£o Paulo) is the CEO and majority owner of Semco SA, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. ...

Studied by management science

Industrial and organizational psychology and even more formal management science has studied the methods of workplace democracy. They are just that - methods - and do not imply any particular political movement, agenda, theory, or ideology: There are many management science papers on the application of democratic structuring, in particular, to the workplace, and the benefits of it. Such benefits are usually compared to simple command hierarchy arrangements in which "the boss" can hire anyone and fire anyone, and takes absolute and total responsibility for his own well-being and also all that occurs "under" him. The command hierarchy is a preferred management style followed in Indian software companies for its simplicity, speed and low process overheads. The command hierarchy is based on the assumption that the boss is always good and right and the employee is always bad and wrong. Industrial and organizational psychology (also known as I/O psychology, work psychology, work and organisational psychology, W-O psychology, occupational psychology, or personnel psychology) concerns the application of psychological theories, research methods, and intervention strategies to workplace issues. ... Management science, or MS, is the discipline of using mathematics, and other analytical methods, to help make better business decisions. ... Politics is the process and method of decision-making for groups of human beings. ... Management science, or MS, is the discipline of using mathematics, and other analytical methods, to help make better business decisions. ... The principles of democratic structuring were defined by ((Jo Freeman]] in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, 1970, Berkeley Journal of Sociology. ... A command hierarchy is a group of people committed to carrying out orders from the top, that is, of authority. ... A command hierarchy is a group of people committed to carrying out orders from the top, that is, of authority. ... A command hierarchy is a group of people committed to carrying out orders from the top, that is, of authority. ...

Early theory

20th century pioneers of workplace democracy include the early Belgian advocates of syndicalism who argued that workers had more knowledge but less control of the workplace than they had of major political decisions (where they at least had a vote and the right to be heard even if they knew nothing about the situation). Of these theorists the most influential, de Paepe, is often considered as a peer or competitor to Karl Marx's concept of the workplace as merely a cauldron and test for the proletariat. Syndicalism refers to a set of ideas, movements, and tendencies which share the avowed aim of transforming capitalist society through action by the working class on the industrial front. ... Cesar De Paepe was a prominent syndicalist whose work strongly influenced the Industrial Workers of the World and the syndicalist movement in general. ... Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany â€“ March 14, 1883, London) was a German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary. ... The proletariat (from Latin proles, offspring) is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian. ...

Relation to political theory

However, workplace democracy theory closely follows political, especially where businesses are large or politics is small:

Spanish anarchists, Mohandas Gandhi, farm and retail co-operative movements, all made contributions to the theory and practice of workplace democracy and often carried that into the political arena as a "more participatory democracy". The Green Parties worldwide adopted this as one of their Four Pillars and also often mimic workplace democracy norms such as gender equity, co-leadership, deliberative democracy applied to any major decision, and leaders who don't do policy. Anarchism, the political philosophy advocating a libertarian society without hierarchy, based on mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, historically gained the most support and influence in Spain, especially in the seventy or so years before Francisco Francos victory in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. ... Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (October 2, 1869 – January 30, 1948) (Devanagari: मोहनदास करमचन्द गांधी), called Mahatma Gandhi, was the charismatic leader who brought the cause of Indias independence from British colonial rule to... A cooperative (also co-operative or co-op) comprises a legal entity owned and democratically controlled by its members, with no passive shareholders. ... Participatory democracy is a broadly inclusive term for many kinds of consultative decision making which require consultation on important decisions by those who will carry out the decision. ... This article is about the green parties around the world. ... The worldwide green parties are committed to the following Four Pillars: Ecology (sometimes Ecological Wisdom) Social Justice Grassroots Democracy Non-Violence In German, it is known as Die Grünen: ökologisch, sozial, basisdemokratisch, gewaltfrei. ... Feminism is a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially in terms of their social, political, and economic situation. ... Deliberative democracy, also sometimes called discursive democracy, is a term used by political theorists, e. ...

Politically, Salvador Allende inspired a large number of such experiments in Chile before his assassination by forces of General Pinochet on September 11, 1973. The book Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer details experiments in workplace feedback that exploited systems theory extensively. Salvador Isabelino del Sagrado CorazÃ³n de JesÃºs Allende Gossens[1] (July 26, 1908 â€“ September 11, 1973) was President of Chile from November 1970 until his death on September 11, 1973. ... Assassin and Targeted killing redirect here. ... General Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte1 (born November 25, 1915) was head of the military government that ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. ... September 11 is the 254th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (255th in leap years). ... 1973 (MCMLXXIII) was a common year starting on Monday. ... Anthony Stafford Beer (September 25, 1926 - August 23, 2002) was a theorist in operational research and management cybernetics. ... Systems theory is a transdisciplinary/multiperspectual scientific domain that seeks to derive and formulate those principles that are isomorphic to all fields of scientific inquiry. ...

Current approaches

Limits of management

Many organizations began by the 1960s to realize that tight control by too few people was creating groupthink, turnover in staff and a loss of morale among qualified people helpless to appeal what they saw as stupid decisions. Usually employees who criticise such stupid decisions of their higher management are fired from their jobs on some false pretext or other. The comic strip Dilbert has become popular satirizing this type of oblivious management, the icon for which is the Pointy Haired Boss, a nameless and clueless social climber. The Dilbert Principle is now generally accepted. Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. ... Look up Turnover in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Morale is a term for the capacity of people to maintain belief in an institution or a goal. ... Dilbert (first published April 16, 1989) is an American comic strip written and drawn by Scott Adams. ... Look up Management in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... The original Pointy-Haired Boss is the fictional manager in the Dilbert comic strip. ... The Dilbert Principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management, in order to limit the amount of damage that theyre capable of doing. ...

Much management philosophy has focused on trying to limit manager power, differentiate leadership versus management, and so on. Henry Mintzberg, Peter Drucker and Donella Meadows were three very notable theorists addressing these concerns in the 1980s. Mintzberg and Drucker studied how executives spent their time, Meadows how change and leverage to resist it existed at all levels in all kinds of organizations. See business ethics or political economy for an overview. ... Professor Henry Mintzberg, OC , OQ , Ph. ... Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909â€“November 11, 2005) was an Austrian author of management-related literature. ... Donella Dana Meadows (March 13, 1941 Elgin, Illinois, USA - February 20, 2001, New Hampshire) was a pioneering environmental scientist, a teacher and writer. ...

Adhocracy, functional leadership models, and reengineering were all attempts to detect and remove administrative incompetence. Business process and quality management methods in general remove managerial flexibility that is often perceived as masking managerial mistakes, but also preventing transparency and facilitating fraud, as in the case of Enron. Had managers been more accountable to employees, it is argued, owners and employees would not have been defrauded. Adhocracy is a type of organization being an opposite of bureaucracy. ... In the functional leadership model, one conceives of leadership not as a person but rather as a set of behaviors that help a group perform their task or reach their goal. ... reengineering (or re-engineering) is the radical redesign of an organizations processes, especially its business processes. ... Administrative incompetence is a term used to describe administrative behaviours that are dysfunctional or that hinder attainment of organization goals. ... A business process is a set of linked activities that create value by transforming an input into a more valuable output. ... Quality management is a method for ensuring that all the activities necessary to design, develop and implement a product or service are effective and efficient with respect to the system and its performance. ... In the physical sciences, specifically in optics, a transparent physical object is one that can be seen through. ... Enron Creditors Recovery Corporation, formerly Enron Corporation, is a defunct America energy company based in Houston, Texas. ...

Influenced matrix management

Managerial grid models and matrix management, compromises between true workplace democracy and conventional top-down hierarchy, became common in the 1990s. These models cross responsibilities so that no one manager had total control of any one employee, or so that technical and marketing management were not subordinated to each other but had to argue out their concerns more mutually. A consequence of this was the rise of learning organization theory, in which the ontology of definitions in common among all factions or professions becomes the main management problem. The Managerial Grid Model (1964) is a behavioral leadership model developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton. ... Matrix management is a type of management used by some large organizations. ... Peter Senge defined a learning organization as human beings cooperating in dynamical systems (as defined in systemics) that are in a state of continuous adaptation and improvement. ... In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek , genitive : of being (part. ...

London Business School chief Nigel Nicholson in his 1998 Harvard Business Review paper How Hardwired is Human Behavior? suggested that human nature was just as likely to cause problems in the workplace as in larger social and political settings, and that similar methods were required to deal with stressful situations and difficult problems. He held up the workplace democracy model advanced by Ricardo Semler as the "only" one that actually took cognizance of human foibles. London Business School, in London (UK), established in 1965, is an international business school and a constituent college of the University of London, providing postgraduate degrees in finance and management, including MBA (Master of Business Administration) courses, as well as non-degree courses for business executives. ... December 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review. ... See also : Human nature (disambiguation) Human nature is the fundamental nature and substance of humans, as well as the range of human behavior that is believed to be invariant over long periods of time and across very different cultural contexts. ... Ricardo Semler (born 1959 in SÃ£o Paulo) is the CEO and majority owner of Semco SA, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. ...

Semler and Semco

Semler, in his own book Maverick, explained how he took his family firm in Brazil, a light manufacturing concern called Semco, and transformed it into a strictly democratic firm where managers were interviewed and then elected by workers, where all decisions were subject to democratic review, debate and vote, and where every worker was expected to justify themselves to their peers. This radical approach to total quality management got him and the company a great deal of attention. Semler argued that handing the company over to the workers was the only way to free time for himself to go build up the customer, government and other relationships required to make the company grow. By literally giving up the fight to hold any control of internals, Semler was able to focus on marketing, positioning, and offer his advice (as a paid, elected, spokesman, though his position as major shareholder was not so negotiable) as if he were, effectively, an outside management consultant. Decentralisation of management functions, he claimed, gave him a combination of insider information and outsider credibility, plus the legitimacy of truly speaking for his workers in the same sense as an elected political leader. Ricardo Semler (born 1959 in SÃ£o Paulo) is the CEO and majority owner of Semco SA, a Brazilian company best known for its radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. ... Management (from Old French ménagement the art of conducting, directing, from Latin manu agere to lead by the hand) characterises the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization, often a business, through the deployment and manipulation of resources (human, financial, material, intellectual or intangible). ... Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. ... There is also an album by Blur called Leisure. ... Customers are waiting in front of a famous fashion shop for its grand opening in Hong Kong. ... Management consulting is the process of helping companies to improve or transform themselves. ... Decentralisation (American: decentralization) is any of various means of more widely distributing decision-making to bring it closer to the point of service or action. ...

The book ends with twenty pages of cartoons that constitute Semco's only employee manual. They explain such things as the company's attitudes to women and their advancement, managers and their role, sales and operations, technology, and read somewhat like the rationale of a nonprofit or political party. A cartoon is any of several forms of illustrations with varied meanings that evolved from its original meaning. ...

Nicholson's analysis was more academic and conventional and focused on many other detailed problems of human behaviour and dispute resolution, which he claimed Semler had resolved. It has been suggested that Adjudication be merged into this article or section. ...

Venezuela

Venezuela has instituted worker-run "co-management" initiatives in which worker councils are the cornerstone of the management of a plant or factory. In co-management experiments such as at the Alcasa factory, both workers and strategists take part in management discussions and decision, with one elected representative from each functional area work together amid reams of statistics, charts sketched on the white board and scale models (BBC News, 17 August 2005, [[1]] last visited 22/9/06).

versus Taylorism

A more political approach to workplace reforms was advocated in Closing The Iron Cage: The Scientific Management of Work and Leisure by Canadian sociologist Ed Andrew based on Max Weber's notion "that the spirit of capitalism envelopes our activities like an iron cage, that the ubiquitous structure of technical rationality appears as an iron cage to those who live in it." Sociology is the study of the social lives of humans, groups and societies. ... For other persons named Max Weber, see Max Weber (disambiguation). ... It has been suggested that Definitions of capitalism be merged into this article or section. ...

Andrew critiques Frederick Winslow Taylor and so-called Taylorism that has grown up - beyond limits that Taylor himself would not have advocated - to become a "scientific management of leisure." Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 - March 21, 1915) was an American engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. ... Taylorism or Scientific management is the name of the approach to management and Industrial/Organizational Psychology initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor in his 1911 monograph The Principles of Scientific Management. ...

Andrew asks provocative questions such as:

Are work and leisure mutually exclusive spheres?
Can individuals condemned to alienating "scientifically managed" work environments ever really function as free players in their "free" time?

Andrew argues that both the political left and the right accept the thesis of "leisure-as-compensation" and that most issues between unions and "management" are too narrowly framed. Andrew in particular believes that scientifically managed leisure is "the closing of an iron cage of technological rationality" on all human life. In other words, a technological escalation not just in the workplace but also imposed by the need to use communications, transport, and other technologies to get to work, learn, do the work itself, and justify the work afterwards. Such technologies as PowerPoint, for instance, take time to learn and to use, and that time is taken away from either real work, or leisure. â€œLeftismâ€ redirects here. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Left-Right politics. ... Technological escalation describes the fact that whenever two parties are in competition, each side tends to employ continuing technological improvements to defeat the other. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Powerpoint Microsoft Office PowerPoint is a ubiquitous presentation program developed for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS computer operating systems. ...

The growth of scientific management in the industrial work force, and the consequences of that growth for how workers spend their leisure time, according to Andrew, combine to create a false idea of workplace efficiency. His critique is similar to that used to justify throughput accounting: overfocus on human labour is counter-productive since more and more minute divisions of labour deny workers' intelligence and creativity at work, destroys their ability to enjoy their time away from work, and puts them always at risk of losing opportunities simply for experimenting, thinking or dreaming on the job. An undemocratic workplace cannot be substituted by "more, and more enjoyable, leisure" if "boring and denigrating work" that alienates the individual - a key concern of Marx's sociology - remains the daily norm. Scientific management or Taylorism is the name of the approach to management and industrial and organizational psychology initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor in his 1911 monograph The Principles of Scientific Management (Online version). ... Throughput accounting (TA) is an alternative to cost accounting proposed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...

He counters pseudo-"conservative claims by efficiency experts that productivity is greatest when individual initiative is minimized" which is exactly the opposite of the ideal preached for entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting new organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities. ...

He presents his own model, worker self-management, which he claims "would give all workers the same ability to create their jobs and to mingle leisure and work", as a radical alternative to both scientific management and technocratic socialism. His economic and organizational framework he intends to provide a unity of meaningful work and leisure.

His model parallels that of Amartya Sen who argued in his 1999 Development as Freedom that the goal of all sustainable development must be the freeing of human time. But while Sen addresses the interface between the workplace and leisure-place, Andrew addresses freedom within the workplace. Amartya Sen Amartya Kumar Sen CH (Hon) (Bengali: Ã”morto Kumar Shen) (born 3 November 1933 in Santiniketan, India), is an Indian philosopher, economist and a winner of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize for Economics) in 1998, for his work on famine, human development theory, welfare... Development as Freedom is a book written by Amartya Sen. ... Sustainable development has also been defined as the process of balancing the need of humans for economic and social development with the need to protect the natural and built environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but in the indefinite future. ...

Many of Andrew's ideas were echoed by companies during the dotcom boom during which many experiments in combining work and leisure were launched, but mostly applied only to higher level creative workers such as software developers, not to people doing more routine work. Dot-com (also dotcom or redundantly dot. ... A software developer is a person who is concerned with one or more facets of the software development process, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming or a specialty of project managing. ...

Advantages and disadvantages

Workplace democracy is too complex to offer more than a general overview of its advantages and its disadvantages. Two obvious differences are that lockouts can't happen without the support of the majority of the workers, and strikes will not be motivated by lack of control over who manages. A lockout is a work stoppage in which an employer prevents employees from working. ...

Centralization and change management take place only by request: work teams and units must retain at least the power to resist changes and centralization of work functions they have performed. Presumably, though, any private sector work team recognizes legitimate arguments to centralize or change. The Politics series Politics Portal This box: Centralization (or centralisation) is the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding decision-making, become concentrated within a particular location and/or group. ... Change is a fact of life. ... The private sector of a nations economy consists of all that is outside the state. ...

Individual career development

Employee development, job enrichment, job rotation can be arranged ad hoc by the work team itself to suit its own schedule. Job sharing is also possible and desirable if a worker wants time off and another is in a position to do overtime, without the concern that this will set a precedent for management abuses or job losses. In organizational development (or OD), the study of career development looks at: how individuals manage their careers within and between organizations and how organizations structure the career progress of their members, can be tied into succession planning within some organizations. ... Employee development refers to the strategic investment, by an organization, in the training of its members. ... Job enrichment in organizational development, human resources management, and organizational behavior, is the process of improving work processes and environments so they are more satisfying for employees. ... In leadership development, an approach to management development is job rotation where an individual is moved through a schedule of assignments designed to give him or her a breadth of exposure to the entire operation. ... Ad hoc is a Latin phrase which means for this [purpose]. It generally signifies a solution that has been tailored to a specific purpose, such as a tailor-made suit, a handcrafted network protocol, and specific-purpose equation and things like that. ... Overtime is the amount of time someone works beyond normal working hours; these may be determined in several ways, by custom (what is considered healthy or reasonable by society), by practices of a given trade or profession, by legislation, or by agreement between employers and workers or their representatives. ... In law, a precedent or authority is a legal case establishing a principle or rule that a court may need to adopt when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts. ...

Succession planning is everyone's problem: senior management will be replaced by whoever is elected to replace them. Mentoring specific people to do those jobs may be more risky, as management development is uncertain: a highly effective manager who is disliked can simply fail to achieve the position that they have been groomed for. This is also true in representative democracy, where "groomed" leaders can fail to win an election or lose their party's support. But in organizations there is less talent ultimately to choose from, and losing people is more serious, especially if leadership development is more certain elsewhere. In organisational development, succession planning is the process of identifying and preparing suitable employees, through mentoring, training and job rotation, to replace key players (such as the CEO) within an organization as their terms expire. ... Senior management is generally a team of individuals at the highest level of organizational management who have the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a corporation. ... Mentoring refers to a developmental relationship between a more experienced mentor and a less experienced partner referred to as a mentoree (sometimes vernacularized into mentee) or protÃ©gÃ©. // Historical The roots of the practice are lost in antiquity. ... In organizational development (OD), the effectiveness of management is recognized as one of the determinants of organizational success. ... In management, the ultimate measure of managements performance is the metric of management effectiveness which includes: execution, or how well managements plans were carried out by members of the organization leadership, or how effectively management communicated and translated the vision and strategy of the organization to the members... Representative democracy is a form of democracy founded on the exercise of popular sovereignty by the peoples representatives. ... In organizational development, leadership development is the strategic investment in, and utilization of, the human capital within the organization. ...

Organizational structure and management

Office politics in such an environment can be extreme: people might devote a lot of time to keeping their colleagues satisfied and supporting them socially and politically, and there is less surety of success. Performance appraisals in particular is extremely sensitive, as it's conducted by peers. Meetings and meeting systems must generally be extremely efficient, and require strong models of chairmanship and sophisticated models of how to handle consent and dissent. Open-space meetings and wiki methods to define their agendas have been used by some organizations, notably political party and management consultant organizations. One example is the Living Agenda pioneered by Canadian political parties. office politics is a slang term for the often counterproductive human factors present between coworkers, in an office environment in the private or public sector. ... Performance appraisal is a method by which the performance of an employee is measured (generally in terms of quality, quantity, cost and Time). ... Meetings are sometimes held around conference tables. ... A meeting system is any systemic means of improving meetings, workshops or conferences. ... Dissent is a sentiment or philosophy of non-agreement or opposition to an idea (eg. ... The open-space meeting is a very specific and influential concept of an open space conference, and an example of a meeting system. ... Look up Wiki in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Political parties Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box: A political party is a political organization that seeks to attain political power within a government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns. ... Management consulting is the process of helping companies to improve or transform themselves. ... The Green Party of Canada Living Platform is a wiki used to employ participatory democracy in the writing of this political partys electoral platform. ...

Organizational commitment cannot be promised without extreme consultation. This may be an edge, in some industries, but it certainly takes longer. Organizational development, metrics for same, changes in the structure also take longer to negotiate. Organizational culture should however be generally more accepting of organizational learning and peer review of performance. In the study of organizational behavior, organizational commitment is the employees psychological attachment to the organization. ... The field of organization development (OD) has had several definitions. ... Organizational performance comprises the actual output or results of an organization as measured against its intended outputs (or goals and objectives). ... This does not cite its references or sources. ... Organizational culture, or corporate culture, comprises the attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values of an organization. ... Organizational learning is an area of knowledge within organizational theory that studies models and theories about the way an organization learns and adapts. ... Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. ... Organizational performance comprises the actual output or results of an organization as measured against its intended outputs (or goals and objectives). ...

Performance improvement, self-assessment and coping with one's own resistance to change is easier if the rate of change or depth of assessment is negotiated with one's peers who must deal with the same changes and challenges. However, this is not to say those skills always apply in management: Peter principle applies if anything faster: people who are perceived as effective are elected to run things, which they promptly fail at. However, there is much more acceptance of returning to the shop floor as a worker if someone fails at management, which is much more difficult in organizations where there is a culture gap between managers and workers. Process improvement is often thought to be facilitated by such swaps, e.g. the CBC television show Venture runs a regular series called Back to the Floor, a corporate reality show where Chief Executive Officers and a low level employee change jobs for a week. Process management is usually reported as benefitting from the direct attention of the CEO, and professional development of the lower level employee is also facilitated, as they discover whether they feel fit to take leadership or not. Performance improvement is the concept of measuring the output of a particular process or procedure, then modifying the process or procedure in order to increase the output, increase efficiency, or increase the effectiveness of the process or procedure. ... The EFQM definition is as follows, Self-Assessment is a comprehensive, systematic and regular review of an organisations activities and results referenced against the EFQM Excellence Model. ... In organizational development, as OD practitioners assist their clients with managing change, they almost always find themselves dealing with some form of resistance to change. ... The Peter Principle is a colloquial principle of hierarchiology, stated as In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. ... Process Improvement Process Improvement is a series of actions taken to identify, analyze and improve existing processes within an organization to meet new goals and objectives. ... The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a Canadian crown corporation, is the countryâ€™s national public radio and television broadcaster. ... http://www. ... Reality television is a genre of television programming in which the fortunes of real life people (as opposed to fictional characters played by actors) are followed. ... A Chief Executive Officer (CEO), or Chief Executive, is the highest-ranking corporate officer, administrator, corporate administrator, executive, or executive officer, in charge of total management of a corporation, company, organization or agency. ... Process management is the ensemble of activities of planning and monitoring the performance of a process, especially in the sense of business process, often confused with reengineering. ... Professional development refers to vocational education with specific reference to continuing education of the person undertaking it in the area of employment, it may also provide opportunities for other career paths. ...

Servant leadership is inevitable: leaders who do not serve, are simply voted out of the job. Servant leadership is an approach to leadership development, coined and defined by Robert Greenleaf and advanced by several authors such as Stephen Covey, Peter Block, Peter Senge, Max De Pree, Margaret Wheatley, Ken Blanchard, and others. ...

Teams, talent and careers

Talent identification and management take place at the same time, on the shop floor where it is easy to assess competence. Team building and management rely on the same interpersonal relationships as did hiring. Termination of employment is also by the same people. This is a simple, perhaps even tribal, model of how human teams must work. Work stoppages are common but very short in such an environment, due mostly to interpersonal problems that are soon worked out, because the team has the power to resolve the issue itself. // Modern society and culture continues to become more fluid and dynamic. ... Team management teaches a number of techniques that aim at forming and managing teams. ... Fired and Firing redirect here. ... http://www. ... A work stoppage is an event at which work at a place of employment has come to a halt, either through a strike action, where employees cease working (often backed up by a labor union), or through a lockout, where the employer bars the employees from entering the place of...

Unfair dismissal claims are impeded because any firing is due to losing the support of one's fellow team members and the faith of the social network of one's peers on the shop floor. In any jurisdiction, this is a legitimate criteria for dismissal, that one is not able to retain the faith of one's colleagues. Unfair dismissal is the term used to describe an employers action when terminating an employees contract unfairly. ... // An example of a social network diagram Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. ...

"The co's" (Co-determination, co-operation, coaching, collaboration and collective bargaining) may be easier in environments where consensus or consensus-seeking decision-making is already practiced for the most important decisions: who leads. Consensus democracy methods already exist to make very large scale decisions in social organizations. Co-determination (also: codetermination) is a practice whereby the employees have a role in management of a company. ... Co-operation refers to the practice of people or greater entities working in common with commonly agreed-upon goals and possibly methods, instead of working separately in competition. ... A coach is a person who supports people (clients) to achieve their goals, with goal setting, encouragement and questions. ... Collaboration is the process wherein units work together to achieve outcomes for shared stakeholders, quicker and more cost effectively than if they worked on their own, without having to change the how codes of any of the participating Units. ... A Collective agreement is a labor contract between an employer and one or more unions. ... Consensus decision-making is a decision-making process that not only seeks the agreement of most participants, but also to resolve or mitigate the objections of the minority to achieve the most agreeable decision. ... Consensus-seeking decision-making (also known as consensus/voting hybrid decision-making) is a term sometimes used to describe a formal decision process similar to the consensus decision-making variant known as Formal Consensus but with the additional option of a fallback voting procedure if consensus appears unattainable during the... Consensus democracy is the application of consensus decision making to the process of legislation. ...

Not always applicable

Organizations that are thought not to be able to apply workplace democracy as easily are those that already have management that is elected by one person, one vote methods, especially: OMOV, an acronym standing for one man, one vote or one member, one vote, is a term used to support wider and more equal participation in political systems. ...

a political party or a bureaucracy carrying out detailed orders of a political level, who must typically be quite loyal to it
a co-operative where all workers are also owners
Union shops in general, but especially:
- Closed shops in industries where specific unions are very entrenched, where such democracy would compete with trade unions already established, even if those unions are not very democratic - the argument being that only a more democratic union should be replacing a less democratic one, not some non-unionized approach
- See union democracy for an article regarding the actual practice of democracy in trade unions
emergency response functions such as medicine where there is extreme need to retain responsibility for all decisions, and where rights to do certain things depends on credentials and interpersonal trust that can't be challenged very easily.

One counter-argument however is that these organizations also require more internal harmony to work, and that harmony is better assessed at regular intervals by elections and reviews, than only under stresses: A dictator is far more likely to lose control of an organization during a crisis than anyone elected. Political parties Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box: A political party is a political organization that seeks to attain political power within a government, usually by participating in electoral campaigns. ... The Politics series Politics Portal This box: Bureaucracy is a concept in sociology and political science referring to the way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal rules are socially organized. ... A cooperative (also co-operative or co-op) comprises a legal entity owned and democratically controlled by its members, with no passive shareholders. ... A union shop is a place of employment where the employer may hire either labor union members or nonmembers but where nonmembers must become union members within a specified period of time or lose their jobs. ... A closed shop is a business or industrial establishment whose employees are required to be union members or to agree to join the union within a specified time after being hired. ... A trade union or labor union is a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment. ... Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union is a book by Seymour Martin Lipset, Martin Trow and James S. Coleman, originally published by New York Free Press in 1956. ... A trade union or labor union is a continuous association of wage-earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment. ... medicines, see medication and pharmacology. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Dictator is originally the title of a magistrate in ancient Rome appointed by the Senate to rule the state in times of emergency. ...

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