Teacher participation in the decision‐making process: reality and repercussions in Indian higher education

Abstract

The study reported here focused on comparing teachers’ actual and desired participation in different decision‐making situations and examined how participation in decision making differs in Indian higher educational institutions. The paper provides a comparison of findings with similar studies conducted in Western settings regarding the relationship of participative decision making (PDM) with some selected organizational variables: teachers’ job satisfaction, organizational goal commitment, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Data were gathered through a survey of 281 faculty members of Banaras Hindu University, India. Results indicate that in the Indian context, teachers’ actual and desired participation was highest in institutional decisions and lowest in technical decisions. Among the personal variables, age, designation, teaching experience and span of service in present institution were found to be significantly related with decisional participation of university teachers. It is recommended that administrators evolve a mechanism for inviting participation of teachers in different decisional domains, based on the findings of this study.

Keywords:

• participative decision making (PDM)
• Decisional Participation Scale (DPS)
• shared decision making (SDM)
• teachers’ empowerment