The Influence of Project Duration and Focus on Involvement in Participatory Processes

Abstract

A hypothesis on the influence of project duration and focus on involvement in participatory processes is formulated based on the literature. Longer lasting projects could theoretically have more involvement of top management. Technological oriented projects should have less top management involvement and more involvement of engineers and designers compared with more organizational focused projects. Asking 277 experts about their latest project indicated that top management is significantly more involved in the longer lasting projects and engineers and designers more in the technological oriented projects. The disadvantage of this study is that it concerns a specific group of experts interested in participatory ergonomics biasing the outcome and categories could be interpreted freely by the experts. Further (longitudinal) casecontrol research is needed to have a better and more valuable predictive value of the effects of involvement of various participants.