The motivational role of consultative participation in a multi-period target setting: An experimental study

Consultative participation is a process where employees provide inputs but managers retain control over the final targets. According to the latest research in accounting, it has no influence on employee performance, and can even decrease employee motivation. This paper distinguishes between the different types of consultative participation, depending on whether managers take into account employees' proposals (real consultative) or ignore them (pseudo-participative). We propose that it is necessary to distinguish among the types of motivation in order to understand how participation impacts on employee motivation. We present a mediating model where autonomous employee motivation is the mediating variable. An experiment was conducted to test this model. Our findings show that real consultative participation increases autonomous motivation, while pseudo-participation decreases it. Autonomous motivation also mediates between participation and employee performance. No effects were found on controlled motivation.