Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of participation in decision-making upon the member's satisfaction. The following two factors were chosen as independent variables in order to examine the effect of participation operationally: namely (1) “total influence”, or the total amount of influences exerted by individual group members upon decision-making, and (2) “level of participation (LP) ”, or the index representing the distribution of varying amounts of influence exerted by individual group members upon decision-making (this index ranges from 0 to 1, and the more the index approaches 1, the more uniformly the group members exert their influences).
Hypotheses were set up as follows: namely, (A) Where the total influence is constant, the degree of the member's satisfaction considered as a function of LP can be graphed as a convex curve; in other words, there exists a level of participation for which the degree of satisfaction is rated as maximum (optimum level of participation), and (B) the optimum level of participation approaches 1 as the total influence increases.
In the experiment, Ss were male university students and the experimental design was based on two-factors completely randamized design. In the factor of total influence, large total influence condition and small total influence condition were introduced and in the factor of LP, condition of 0, 0.5, and 1 were introduced. One group consisted of three persons, two subjects and one confederate. They made a decision on a certain number of words by selecting them from a word list in order to use them in a composition which they were subsequently supposed to write by group work. Total influence was manipulated by changing the number of words to be selected by group members and LP was manipulated by changing the distribution of words to be selected. Satisfaction, dependent variable, was measured by questionnaire after the decision was made.
The results showed that the above hypotheses (A) and (B) were both supported.
The reexamination of Mulder's “Power-distance Reduction Theory” was also attempted and the results tended to support it.
