Empowerment Essay ⋆ Business Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Empowerment is the process of conferring decision-making capacity upon those who previously had been unable to decide matters for themselves or had limited ability to do so. In management, employee empowerment refers to the practice of giving employees more responsibility and autonomy in decision making. Empowerment allows decisions to be made at lower levels in the organization and is expected to improve the responsiveness of the organization, increasing productivity and employee commitment to company goals.

Tracing the historical development of the notion of empowerment across disciplines, Jean Bartunek and Gretchen Spreitzer have showed that the meanings of empowerment may be subsumed within three broad categories: sharing real power, fostering human welfare, and fostering productivity. Empowerment meaning sharing real power appeared in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on giving power to those who have little. Empowerment as enabling and fostering human welfare emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on improving the life of people through increasing self-worth, increasing knowledge, dignity, and respect. The last meaning of empowerment, which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, focuses primarily on empowerment as a factor in fostering productivity. This category includes participation in decision making, taking responsibility, sense of ownership, and working in teams. All these three different meanings of empowerment have contributed to the development of the notion of employee empowerment.

In management, empowerment is a term that may cover many different types of management initiatives and an overall common definition has not evolved. A simple definition of employee empowerment is the involvement of employees in the decision-making process regarding their work-related tasks. In this perspective empowerment can be seen as a one-dimensional phenomenon concerned with delegation of management power to subordinates. Alternatively it has been argued that empowerment is a multidimensional phenomenon, an element of broader management strategies to mobilize the multiple skills of employees in order to enhance operational and economic effectiveness. In this perspective empowerment is a management practice that is concerned with a variety of issues, for example, how leaders lead, how employees react, how employees interact with each other, and how work-related processes are structured.

Employee involvement initiatives had been proposed earlier under other labels such as job enrichment, employee participation, and profit sharing. The modern form of employee empowerment emerged in the particular business context of the late 1980s together with notions of enterprise culture giving greater room for individual initiative and new management approaches such as total quality management (TQM) and human resources management (HRM). By the late 1980s, businesses had adopted the basic idea of the need for new modes of managing in turbulent markets, constantly changing technology, and the need to satisfy even more demanding customers in terms of choice, quality, design, and service. Empowerment then became one important element in the management models introduced as an alternative to the traditional hierarchical model of management.

Socio-Structural Empowerment

Three different perspectives have been used to study and understand empowerment: the socio-structural perspective, the psychological, and the critical perspective. Socio-structural empowerment refers to organizational policies, practices, and structures that grant employees power, authority, and influence regarding their work. The focus of the socio-structural perspective is on sharing power throughout the organization. Having power is seen as having formal authority or control over organizational resources. The emphasis is on employee participation through increased delegation of responsibility. The socio-structural perspective emphasizes the importance of changing organizational policies, practices, and structures away from top-down control systems toward high-involvement practices. Specific management practices that indicate a high involvement organization include participative decision making, skill and knowledge-related pay, open flow of information, flat organization structures, and training of employees. Each of these practices may contribute to employee empowerment.

From a socio-structural perspective, empowerment represents a moral hazard for managers, in the sense that the success or failure of employee empowerment depends on the ability of managers to reconcile the potential loss of control inherent in empowerment practices with the organizational need for goal congruence. Setting clear limits for empowerment and building trusting relationships have been found to be effective mechanisms for reducing the risk of this kind of moral hazard.

Psychological Empowerment

In contrast to the socio-structural perspective which defined empowerment in terms of delegation of authority and sharing of resources, the psychological perspective views empowerment as enabling and enhancing personal efficacy. According to the psychological perspective, empowerment is achieved when psychological states produce a perception of empowerment within the employee. Several models of empowerment have been developed to describe different dimensions of this psychological state of the employee, for example the employee’s sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact.

Meaning involves a fit between the needs of one’s work role and one’s beliefs, values, and behaviors. Competence refers to self-efficacy specific to one’s work, a belief in one’s capability to perform work activities with skill. Self-determination is a sense of choice in initiating and regulating one’s actions. Self-determination reflects autonomy over the initiation and continuation of work behavior and processes. Impact is the degree to which one can influence strategic, administrative, or operating outcomes.

Research on the antecedents of psychological empowerment suggests that leaders have a wide variety of levers for enabling psychological empowerment of employees. Many of these antecedents could be developed within the socio-structural perspective on empowerment above. What is different in the psychological perspective is that rather than assuming that the socio-structural antecedents are an indication of empowerment, they are viewed as enabling mechanisms that can facilitate the individual experience of empowerment. For example, a system may provide employees with access to important information, but unless they realize they have value having this information and know how to use it, it will not contribute to their experiencing empowerment. The two perspectives on empowerment are then linked, but have different viewpoints on what empowerment means.

The Critical Perspective

The critical perspective questions the notion of power in empowerment, arguing that typical empowerment interventions are in fact disempowering. According to this perspective, empowerment interventions sometimes create more controls over employees through less obvious means. For example, interventions focused on empowering employees by putting them into work teams may result in extensive peer pressure that leaves employees feeling ever more controlled and disempowered.

These three perspectives on empowerment—the socio-structural, the psychological, and the critical—may be seen as complementary to one another, each providing a different lens for understanding empowerment in the workplace. The socio-structural perspective focuses on the organization. The psychological perspective focuses on the individual and their experience. And the critical perspective focuses on the political nature of empowerment and the potential for new forms of domination.

Empowerment Programs

Employee empowerment initiatives may involve a variety of management policies, for example, information sharing, upward problem solving, task autonomy, attitudinal shaping, and self-management. Information sharing between management and employees is a central element in three different areas. Downward communication from management to employees is important to raise employees’ understanding of the reasons for business decisions. It is also seen as important that employees have the opportunity to express their views openly through upward communication, as well as through horizontal communication channels in teams or in work groups. Upward problem solving involves various practices that make it possible for employees to inform on or to act directly on production problems observed to stimulate continuous improvements of products or processes.

Task autonomy involves organizational restructuring toward more or less self-managing teams. The teams may have autonomy concerning most production-related issues but are normally still working within a structure determined by management. Attitudinal shaping concerns psychological aspects of empowerment and my involve training and education. A further core element in empowerment programs is a limited form of self-management in projects, teams or work groups. Empowerment programs may incorporate some or all of these dimensions.

It is generally assumed that empowerment is connected with high levels of commitment and organizational performance. From a relational perspective, empowerment involves power redistribution that is expected to produce interpersonal trust and collaboration among employees. Empowerment allows decisions to be made at lower levels in the organization, thereby improving the responsiveness of the organization. Research shows that employee empowerment can lead to better decision making as well as to higher levels of training, motivation, and productivity.

Bibliography:

M. Bartunek and G. M. Spreitzer, “The Interdisciplinary Career of a Popular Construct Used in Management: Empowerment in the Late 20th Century,” Journal of Management Inquiry (2006);
A. Conger and R. N. Kanungo, “The Empowerment Process: Integrating Theory and Practice,” Academy of Management Review (1989);
Wendy Fenci and Mary Ann Masarech, “Stop Spinning Your Wheels: Increase Employee Engagement at Your Company,” Workspan (v.51/9, 2008);
Foy, Empowering People at Work (Gower, 1994);
D. Lincoln, C. Travers, P. Ackers, and A. Wilkinson, “The Meaning of Empowerment: The Interdisciplinary Etymology of a New Management Concept,” International Journal of Management Review (2002);
Deepa Narayan-Parker, Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (World Bank, 2005);
M. Spreitzer, “Toward Common Ground in Defining Empowerment,” in Research in Organizational Change and Development, R. W. Woodman and W. A. Pasmore, eds. (JAI Press, 1997);
W. Thomas and B. A. Velthouse, “Cognitive Elements of Empowerment: An ‘Interpretive’ Model of Intrinsic Task Motivation,” Academy of Management Review (1990);
Wilkinson, “Empowerment: Theory and Practice,” Personnel Review (1998).

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