Key elements in shared decision-making

Efforts to develop site-based management and other means of engaging many members of the school community in decision-making have a long and checkered history in education. In a sense, site-based management has been “everywhere and nowhere” (Wohlstetter & Odden, 1992, p. 530-531): many school-systems around the United States have adopted it, yet, in practice, few have carried it out in ways that give staff members more meaningful decision-making responsibilities.

In order to explore the factors that might contribute to more effective engagement of school members in decision-making, Patricia Wohlstetter and her colleagues (Wohlstetter, Smyer, & Mohrman, 1994) looked at the extent to which Edward Lawler’s (1986) framework for “high-involvement management” might apply to schools. Lawler’s framework suggests that employees need to have:

• Power to make decisions and influence organizational practice in key areas like budgeting, personnel, and work processes.
• Knowledge that enables employees to contribute to organizational performance (including the technical knowledge to do their jobs well; the business knowledge for managing the organization; and the interpersonal skills to work as members of a team).
• Information about the performance of the organization (including information on how the performance of the organization compares to others).
• Rewards for high performance (including a compensation structure aligned to the skills, abilities, and behaviors required for high performance and performance-based pay allocated on a group or team basis).

Wohlstetter and her colleagues concentrated their study in schools that had been engaged with site-based decision-making for some time and compared those that were successful in making changes in curriculum and instruction and those that were far less successful in making changes. While the more and less successful schools did not differ substantially in compensation structure and the kinds of rewards they offered, the study confirmed the value of knowledge, information, and power: the more successful schools invested more heavily in team-building skills and staff development; they created more opportunities for sharing information across classrooms and grade levels; and they had more mechanisms for teachers to participate in governance. In the struggling schools, however, teachers remained isolated, and they had few if any mechanisms for interacting and sharing information around instruction in particular.