Abstract:
Participative decision making (PDM) is one of the most essential factors in context of
an organization. It is defined as ‘the art of involvement of employees in decision making
to accomplish organizational objectives’. A wide range of research shows that the
involvement of engineers in organizational decision making was low. This indicates the
possibility of firm’s managers are not being analytical about employee’s participative
decision making, possibly due to the concept of high power distance culture. In this type
of culture, employees are only considered as workforce, and their opinions are not
considered valuable. Moreover, Management usually expects a single certain answer
for clear direction instead of a variety of possible options. This study aims to investigate
the impact of participation of software developers in decision making on product
performance. For this purpose, the impact of age, qualification, gender, job satisfaction
in the workplace, and product performance on the level of PDM of software developers
have been investigated. This study was conducted in the software industry of Pakistan.
In this study, a quantitative research approach is used. The data for this study was
collected through a questionnaire from a sample of 200 software developers working
in the software houses across Pakistan. The findings of the data were analyzed using
SPSS. The results show that significant relationship exists between level of PDM and
product performance. Similarly, significant relationship exists between level of PDM
and job satisfaction. The results of this study can help decision-makers in
understanding that participative decision making significantly increases the employee's
work outcomes, like employee’s job satisfaction and productivity of employees in terms
of product performance to their organization.
