Beyond Participative Management: Toward Total Employee Empowerment for Quality

In October of 1990, McClellan Air Force Base received the President's yearly Quality Improvement Prototype Award, owing largely to the base's participation in Project Pacer Share, a new paradigm for organizational design. The project was specifically cited in the President's Quality Award, won by the Air Force Logistics Command in 1991. In this work, two individuals actively involved in creating and implementing the program examine its development and use at McClellan, and describe how such a program can be applied to the management of organizations to lead workers to a total quality approach based on customer-focused and process-centered behavior.

Aware of their particular biases toward the project, the authors offer their own separate perspectives, and also include observations written by other labor, management and non-management participants in the program. In the first section, G. Ronald Gilbert, the primary outside consultant to Project Pacer Share, discusses where large organizations in America have been and where they need to go to make a transformation to a quality approach to work. Section two, written by the project's chief developer/designer, Ardel Nelson, offers recollections and critical thoughts about the development of the program within the Civil Service system. Two other members of the design team also add their perspective. The authors and other project participants describe the various processes, tools, and techniques used in the project in section three, and the book concludes with a discussion of the results of the program from the viewpoint of the authors, members of the design team, and the current project director. This book will be an important study for students and professionals in the fields of general management, total quality management (TQM), and international business, as well as for those in human resource management and labor relations.

G. RONALD GILBERT, team builder consultant for Project Pacer Share, is Associate Professor of Management at Florida International University at North Miami, and President of Management, Education, and Development, Inc. of Boca Raton.

ARDEL E. NELSON was formerly Project Manager of Project Pacer Share at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California. He is currently Chair of the Management Department at American River College at Sacramento and Principal at Nelson and Nelson Management Consultants.