This study aims to examine the effect of participatory decision making on lecturer performance by using career development as a mediating variable. The development of the social exchange theory model which is used as the basic model of this study examines the exchange patterns that occur in lecturers, namely when lecturers get the opportunity to be involved in decision making and are given support by the university, the lecturer shows good performance behavior towards the university. However, the phenomenon that occurs is that many lecturers have low performance even though they have participated in decision making and received organizational support. Intervening variable career development in mediating the effect of participatory decision making on the performance of university lecturers in the LLdikti 6 area of Central Java. The research was conducted by survey method. Collecting data using a questionnaire to 153 lecturers who were selected using simple random sampling. The data were analyzed using the path analysis method with the help of the SPSS version 24 program. The results showed that participatory decision-making directly had a positive and significant effect on career development, and participatory decision-making and career development directly had a positive and significant effect on lecturer performance. In addition, based on the results of the path analysis, it can be seen that career development acts as an intervening the influence of participatory decision making on lecturer performance.