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Participative Decision-Making and School Innovativeness: An Uncertainty Management Perspective

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Abstract

School innovativeness determines the vitality of schools as learning organizations. However, schools markedly vary in innovativeness, and research is needed to account for this variability. The present study provides a theoretical account of this variability based on an uncertainty management perspective. Conceptualizing participative decision-making as an organizational routine through which uncertainty is shared and collectively managed, we hypothesize that participative decision-making is conducive to the school’s organizational capacity to foster innovation. Our hierarchical linear modeling analysis of 7507 schools in 41 countries lends support to this hypothesis. The findings demonstrate that the level of school innovativeness tends to be higher in schools that make greater use of participative decision-making. This pattern was observed in all countries examined, and the pattern was even clearer in countries with a stronger cultural orientation toward uncertainty avoidance. Although further research is needed, this study concludes that participative decision-making can promote school innovativeness by facilitating the distributed management of uncertainty.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the OECD’s TALIS database https://www.oecd.org/education/talis/) and other sources as cited in the study.

Notes

  1. School innovativeness has been reported to have a positive effect on teachers in terms of their job satisfaction, innovative teaching, and reflection in practice among others (Blömeke et al., 2021; Thurlings et al., 2015).

  2. In her seminal analysis of the everyday teaching practices of school teachers, Kennedy (2005) observed many teachers who tried to “seek an optimal level of student engagement that was not too low but also not too high” (p. 183), sticking to “their envisioned script” (p. 188) of teaching. This observation echoes Rosenholtz’s (1989) finding that teachers often employ “self-defensive tactics to protect their sense of control” (p. 5).

  3. Countries markedly vary in “the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations” (Hofstede et al., 2010, p. 191). While people in some countries share a strong cultural tendency to avoid uncertain situations, people in other countries are less reluctant to live with uncertainties. While the current study uses the school as the primary unit of analysis, we also incorporate national culture into our analysis as a larger contextual variable.

  4. The validity and reliability of the measure were supported by factor structure and McDonald’s omega coefficient for the items used (see Table 4—Appendix). Similar items were also used in previous studies (e.g., Blömeke et al., 2021).

  5. The validity and reliability of the measure were supported by factor structure and McDonald’s omega coefficient for these items (see Table 5—Appendix). Similar items were also used in previous studies (e.g., Smylie et al., 1996).

  6. In the unconditional model not reported in Table 3, the intercept (γ00) was 2.974 (p < 0.001) and the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was 0.182.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2022S1A5A2A01044979). The research fund of Hanyang University provided further support for this work (HY-202100000001531).

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  1. College of Education, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

    Seung-Hwan Ham & Seunghyun Lee

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Factor loadings and omega coefficient for school innovativeness
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Table 5 Factor loadings and omega coefficient for participative decision-making
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Ham, SH., Lee, S. Participative Decision-Making and School Innovativeness: An Uncertainty Management Perspective. Asia-Pacific Edu Res 33, 717–726 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-023-00769-3

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