Works
- Participation's effects on performance and satisfaction: a reconsideration of research evidence, Academy of Management Review 19(2), 312 to 330, 1994
- Dimensional research on organization structure: meta-analysis and conceptual redirection, Journal of Management & Organization 31(4), 1854 to 1871 (published online December 2021; issue of July 2025), 2021
In Organizational Structures
Known for
The meta-analytic reckoning with participative management
Ideas
Small effects of participation. Reanalyzing eleven reviews of participation research, Wagner found they all support one conclusion: participation has statistically significant but small effects on performance and satisfaction. Caveat: Participation in decisions, not a structure; the abstract gives no effect sizes.
The weakening of bureaucracy's dimensions. A meta-analysis of 346 correlations from 155 articles found that many interrelationships among formalization, standardization, specialization, vertical differentiation, and decentralization have weakened since an earlier meta-analysis found them significantly intercorrelated, which Wagner reads as failing to support a central tenet of the bureaucratic structural model. Caveat: Read in its abstract only, which does not say which relationships weakened or by how much.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.