Examines relationship between principal leadership styles and attitudes toward sharing decision-making with teachers within the context of state-mandated site-based decision-making in Texas. Finds among other things that a principal's collaborative leadership style increases with experience and adaptability. (Contains 34 references.) (PKP)

Presents five strategies (incorporating a strategic plan, shared decision-making, special topic seminars, a community project, and educator seminars) designed to reduce high school student alienation within months and produce long-term effects on students, teachers, and administrators. Cooperation is the key to success. Includes six references.…

Such innovations as employee stock ownership plans, profit sharing, labor-management committees, quality circles, and work redesign appear to be more popular now than in the past. Research on the impact of these programs suggests that they have negligible or short-lived effects. (JOW)

Examines the experience of worker participation and finds that the tendency is for such programs to weaken unions and limit workers' power in significant ways. (JOW)

The working alliance is that sector of the experience of counseling participants characterized by their collaboration, mutuality, and cooperation with the work of counseling. Discusses the dimensions of the working alliance, counselor and client contributions to it, and perceptions of others about it, and reviews obstacles to building the…

The Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey of 2,353 companies showed sporadic employee participation in decision making. Although case studies of Ford Motor, Australia Post, Lend Lease, Telecom Australia, and Woodlawn Mining illustrate successful programs, most managers appear cautious about industrial democracy. (SK)

Today's participatory work cultures are moving power down through organizations. Many of them empower self-directed work teams (SDTs) with the responsibility for managing themselves and their work. Key issues in building successful SDTs include selecting team players, training for success, and rewarding team performance. (JOW)

Mainstream development is obsessed with material goods, considers humans superior to nature, disempowers women, centralizes resources, and reduces diversity. Sustainable development seeks harmony with nature, is people oriented, focuses on basic needs of all, decentralizes resources, and requires participatory rather than representative democracy.…

Pacific Gas and Electric's employee involvement program aggressively focuses on customer service, performance measurement tied to management bonuses, and commitment to change in the organizational culture. (SK)

Describes Boulder Valley (Colorado) School District's development of a portfolio approach focusing on the administrator's leadership role in improving school success, rather than individual evaluation. The process features stakeholder collaboration in goal-setting and appraisal of school success, concentration on learning and teaching activities,…

Unless unions can gain a greater role in decision making on the content of work, they risk losing members to management-controlled participation schemes. (JOW)

Discusses the development of evaluation's collective capacity and offers an analysis of ways members of the evaluation community can work to build collective strength. These include better efforts to educate evaluation clients. (SLD)

Interviews with 28 middle-school students about their attitudes and beliefs about the leadership. Several common themes about leadership emerged from the interviews, the more prominent of which are that leadership is caring and helping, that teachers are the leaders of the school, and that principals are managers, not leaders. (Contains 43…

The Delaware Education Research and Development Center (DERDC) conducted a two-part study to determine the impacts of this program on participating schools in the state. In the first part, DERDC interviewed a sample of administrators and teachers from 6 of the 15 participating schools. Their responses helped design a survey that was administered…

When Stephanie Smith became the principal of Seaford (Delaware) Middle School four years ago, she was told to accept the fact that the school would never be able to change its status as a school that needed to improve. She did not accept that. To improve performance levels, she set the expectations high. Her defiance paid off: the school is now…