CHAPTER ONE 1.0 INTRODUCTION Employee participation is creating an environment in which people have an impact on decision and actions that affect their jobs. Employee participation is not the goal nor is it a tool, as practiced in Nigerian Public sectors. Rather, employee participation is a management and leadership philosophy about how people are most enabled to contribute to continuous improvement and the on going success of the public sectors. Anyanwuocha (2003) explained that public sector are government or state owned business organizations, which are usually set up by act of legislation, with the main aim of maximizing public welfare. Moving decision making power downward in public sector is at the core of what employee participation is all about. Teams are a potentially powerful way to move power downward. The employee participation have also been implemented in the Nigerian public sectors in order to motivate the employees by involving them with the management for taking serious decisions about the public sector.
Research on employee participation begun to provide information on the number and types of programmes that exist, their
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structure and their effects on a variety of social-psychological, production and economic issues in the public sector. To date, little is known about the financial condition of the Nigerian public sectors with employee participation in decision making. Although the popular literature suggest that employee participation in decision making has been implemented in the Nigerian public sector in distress and has been effective in restoring financial health. 1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY It should be recent that a decision is a choice whereby a person forms a conclusion about a situation. Gostell L. Wand Zalkind S.S. (1963) defined the term decision making as a choice process, choosing one from among several possibilities. This depicts a course of behaviour about what must be done or vice versa. Decision however translated into concrete action. Planning engenders decision guided by company policy and objectives, policies, procedures and programmes.
The aim of decision making is to channel human behaviour towards a future goal. Decision-making is however one of the most important activities of management. It has been the pre-occupation
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of all management of multifarious organization to multi-national corporations. Managers often consider decision making to be the heart of their job in that they must always choose what is done, who will do it, when, where and most of the time how it will be done. Traditionally, managers influence the ordinary employers and specifically their immediate subordinate in the organization. This has resulted in managersâ€Ÿ unnatural decision even in areas affecting their subordinates. In Germany around 1951 a law was enacted which provides for code termination and requires labour membership in the supervisory board and executive committee of certain large corporation enabling subordinates to participate in decision making process resulted to relatively and peaceful labour management relations. The basic concept involves any power-sharing arrangement in which workplace influence is shared among individuals who are otherwise hierarchical unequals. Such power-sharing arrangements may entail various employee involvement schemes resulting in co-determination of working conditions, problem solving and decision making.
It is in this context the researcher wishes to assess the “impact of employee participation in decision making in Nigerian public
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sector” using Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN) Enugu as a case study. 1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEMS There has been a lot of controversy as to whether an employee should participate in management decision making or not. Some writers argued that employees should contribute in making decision more especially where it affects them or their jobs. It is expected that such participation will serve as training and testing ground for future members of upper management. In Nigeria, experts that refuted the above assertion see the arrangement as a symptom of mal-organization. They maintained that qualified, reasonable, honest and company oriented individuals are not available at these lower organizational levels. But the big question is, are skilled individuals really available? All these underlay the need for an investigative study.