Participative Management Practices for Improving Performance in Public Sector Organizations: Mediating Roles of Performance Feedback

A study examining the effects of participative management practices [i.e., participative decision making (PDM) and a self-managing work team] on organizational performance surveyed 403 employees of public enterprises run by the City of Seoul. This study considered performance feedback as a partial mediating variable. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to examine the causal relationships among the variables in a structural model and to investigate construct validity and model fits in a measurement model. We found that a self-managing work team leads to performance improvements, but PDM failed to achieve an improvement in performance. Additionally, this study found that performance feedback played a partial mediating effect on the relationship between a self-managing work team and performance. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the findings.