Normative Models of Decision Making and Leadership

Victor H. Vroom

Psychologists who have advanced normative theories of management have typically advocated highly participative processes for making decisions. The principal basis for such prescriptions is the motivational benefit that results from a leader involving group members in decision making. In spite of this advocacy, reviews of the literature suggest a much more mixed picture of the consequences of participation. One way of reconciling the inconsistent evidence is to attempt to identify the moderating variables that regulate these different effects. Such moderating variables could then be incorporated into a contingency theory to guide managers in selecting the degree of participation appropriate to each situation. In the early 1970s, Victor Vroom, working with a graduate student, Philip Yetton, formulated a normative model of leadership style that had that objective. Expressed as a decision tree, the model distinguished five degrees of participation and eight situational factors believed to interact with participation in determining its ...

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