Democratic or Autocratic Leadership Style? Participative Management and its Links to rewarding Strategies and Job Satisfaction in SMEs

The paper aims at detecting relations between participative management and rewarding strategies as well as employees’ job satisfaction in SMEs. Unlike many studies which examine effectiveness of rewarding policies from a managerial perspective, the article takes employees’ point of view. The empirical part of the paper presents conclusions resulting from analyses of: employee strategic awareness, involvement in goal-setting processes and integration in discussion on company performance, linked to diverse rewarding systems applied in Polish enterprises. Results presented in the paper refer to data from 93 SMEs and 86 large companies, collected at the turn of 2013 and 2014. The authors’ research contributes to the discussion on rewarding strategies, demonstrating that involvement of employees in managerial activities is a precondition for developing performance-based rewarding strategies, and that such involvement makes employees more satisfied with their work. Thus the paper fills in the research gap on linking leadership styles with forms of and satisfaction with remuneration systems.