Collaborative problem-solving involving groups of workers organized in committees or teams has been heralded as a superior method for addressing problems of coordination within complex organizations, permitting more rapid diagnosis and resolution of production problems affecting quality and productivity than do traditional bureaucratic systems (Adler, 1993; Tjosvold, 1986). The new participatory structures operate on the premise that specific knowledge about technical operations and how to improve them is fragmentary and distributed unevenly among workers in different occupations at multiple levels in an organization's hierarchy. Indeed, a central feature of organizational reform programs such as total quality management, continuous improvement, and re-engineering is their reliance on formal group-based problem-solving processes (Hackman and Wageman, 1995). In a participatory bureaucracy, a formal system of employee participation in group problemsolvingactivities provides the opportunity to re-examine old routines and to take advantage of informal shortcuts that employees have worked out on their own. An important goal of such a process is the establishment of better procedures that retain the advantages of bureaucracya associated with a highly specialized division of labor, formalization and standardization.

In this chapter, I am concerned with how widespread group-based participatory practices are in an important sector of manufacturing, that of machined durable goods. Using factor analysis, I assess the interdependency among group-based problem-solving and incentive schemes and their distinctiveness from traditional systems for organizing and rationalizing production work. Which types of enterprises tend to rely on multiple group-based participation mechanisms more than on other forms of work organization? Are enterprises in more competitive markets or more customized markets more likely to rely on these mechanisms?