A Study on Employee Participation in Decision Making

The objective of this paper is to test the influence of individual factors on employee participation in decision making (PDM) among Malaysian middle and top level managers in the private sector. The individual factors involved are trust, demographic similarities and idiocentrism-allocentrism. Leader-member exchange (LMX) is included as a moderating variable for the individual factor – PDM relationships. The relationship between PDM and organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) is also tested with self-efficacy as the moderator. The individual manager is the unit of analysis and the sampling procedure involves self-administered questionnaire surveys on 333 participants. The results reveal that trust is the only individual factor that has an influence on PDM. Self-efficacy has a moderating effect on the PDM-OCB relation. However, LMX did not have any moderating effect. A major implication that emanates from this study is that the differing levels of PDM, which could be explained by, trust among the respondents.