THE EFFECTS OF EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION IN DECISION MAKING ON JOB SATISFACTION

Decision making is one of the most significant activities carried out in an organisation and that is why it is very important to organisational growth. It is an organisational strategy and staff routine activities that require months of collecting information and comparing data before organisational conclusions and decisions are made. Ahsanullah & Omer (2020) opine that the present economic scenario where companies and organisations are highly competitive demand a human resource pool who can generate a high performance level that cannot be replaced by rival organisations. As a result of this, there is a need for organisations to carry their employees and staff along during the process of decision making. The notion of employee involvement in decision-making constitutes a prominent theme within scholarly discourse on the world of business, particularly amongst academics in the disciplines of Industrial Sociology, Industrial Relations, and Management. Igbe & Oti (2023) state that employee participation in decision-making refers to any organisational arrangement that engages lower-level employees in the decision-making process. This entails devolving decision-making responsibility beyond the management cadre, to encompass all stakeholders affected by such decisions, including employees, in both the formulation and implementation phases. Morelli, Casagrande, and Forte (2022) define decision making as the ability to choose between two or more options, and note that decision making has been studied through several theoretical approaches and by different disciplines. It can be regarded as an outcome of mental processes (cognitive processes: memory, thinking, evaluation) leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Decision making involves mapping the likely consequences of decisions, working out the importance of individual factors, and choosing the best course of action to take. In the decision making process, the decision maker’s actions are guided by a goal. Each of the several alternative courses of action is linked to various outcomes. Information is provided on the available alternatives and the value of each outcome relative to the goal. Apepe (2025) defines decision making as the selection of a course of action believed by the decision maker to yield the best result under a given circumstance. He further explains that decision making involves evaluating available alternatives related to a specific goal. The expectation of the decision maker in relation to a particular course of action is what defines his selection or commitment to these alternatives. In most organisations, the decision making process solely rests on the shoulders of those in power, sidelining the employees' views and ideas. Creating a participatory environment for employees is essential to job satisfaction, which in turn helps build a high-performing workforce with a high performance rate leading to organisational growth, success, and expansion. The environmental and contextual changes present a number of competitive challenges to organisations and that means that human resource functions have to be involved in helping build new capacities. One of these challenges is that firms have to ensure that they have the capacity to find, assimilate, compensate and retain human capital in the shape of talented individuals they need to drive the organisation. Today there is a greater emphasis on participatory management which is otherwise known as employee involvement in decision making, encouraging the involvement of stakeholders at all levels of an organisation in analysis of problems, development of strategies and implementation of solutions (Helms, 2020).