ISSN 2360-7998
Abstract
The study investigated the role of participatory management in enhancing organisational performance at the upstream regional office in Owerri. The research design adopted in this study was a descriptive survey research design. The area of this study is the Southeast Zone of Nigeria, with Owerri as the regional capital. The upstream regional office in the Southeast is the Owerri regional office. The population of the study consisted of all staff of the Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission who consented to participate in the study. Hence, a population of 283 staff of all cadres was obtained. The sample of the study comprised 283 staff of NUPRC Owerri regional headquarters who were conveniently selected. The study instrument was a questionnaire titled ‘Impact of Participatory Management of Organisational Performance Questionnaire (IPMOPQ)’. The face validity of the instrument was determined by three experts, two from the Department of Business Administration, Paul University Awka. And one from the Statistics Department from the same institution. To test the reliability of the instruments, the Cronbach's alpha method of reliability was used, and a reliability index of the instrument of 0.72 was obtained, which made the instrument reliable. Data collected from the survey were analysed with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions and simple regression analysis to test the hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance, since each relationship involves one independent variable and one dependent variable. Results revealed that industrial democracy and integrated communication significantly improve performance; transparency, feedback, and inclusive structures lead to better team collaboration and execution; participative decision-making positively affects organisational performance; therefore, joint decision-making results in clearer planning, accountability, and quality outcomes; and investment in intellectual capital improves performance, and training, knowledge-sharing, and innovation correlate positively with operational efficiency. Based on the findings, the study recommended that regular training and knowledge-sharing programmes should be implemented to build employee capacity and innovation, encourage grassroots staff to contribute ideas and suggestions by creating safe, inclusive platforms for expression and re-engineer organisational structures to support decentralisation and employee-led initiatives, among others.
Keywords: upstream regional office, participative management, organisational performance