Educating managers for decision making and leadership

This paper describes a research program, spanning three decades, on the development of a model of leadership style – specifically, the form and degree to which managers should involve team members in decision making. The model distinguishes five levels of participation and, in its current form, 11 situational factors which influence the effects of participation on decision quality, implementation, time, and team development. Pencil and paper and computer‐based representations of the model are described and compared. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the use of the model in management development. Based on experience in training managers in many countries around the world, the author argues that didactic expositions of the model are largely ineffective in producing behavior change unless accompanied by experiential activities which enable managers to examine their own implicit assumptions about the consequences of sharing their decision making power.