Participatory Management in Psychiatry

In psychiatry, the concept of participatory management has been developed in the therapeutic community and elsewhere. The industrial management literature reveals that, although scientific management and human relations theorists saw no necessary conflict between management and worker, more recent writers have noted great conflict between organizational and individual needs. The author attempts to translate the industrial experience to psychiatric bureaucracies and highlights the basic conflicts between participatory management and authority, responsibility, and conflicting value systems.