Introduction: Without any doubt, one of the most important factors to achieve the goals in organization is employing right management methods. According to many experts, management of health care settings is considered as an important teamwork, nowadays. Therefore, providing an appropriate ground in health care settings for participation demands identifying the barriers to participation and the ways to overcome them. This study aimed at assessing the barriers to employing participative management in nursing units of Arak educational hospitals in 2007.

Method: In this descriptive study, 26 nurse managers and 87 nurses working in one of three educational hospitals in Arak, were given a questionnaire to complete. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics.

Results: It was revealed that 56/99% of the participants identified organizational factors as the most important barriers to employing participative management. In addition, most of participants (84/1%) hadn’t passed any course on participative management, and 76/1% of them reported their agreement with participative atmosphere in organization and the rest agreed to some extent. In another words, there was no objection regarding this issue.

Conclusion: The study indicated that the most important barrier to employing participative management was organizational factors. The next important barriers were personnel’ cultural, individual-managerial and personal- staff barriers. Managers’ development for competency-oriented management, not only can help to get ride of the barriers, but also results in employing participative management or choosing an appropriate management style in organization.