Empowerment Essay

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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:   

  1. 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);
  2. A. Conger and R. N. Kanungo, “The Empowerment Process: Integrating Theory  and  Practice,”  Academy  of Management  Review (1989);
  3. Wendy Fenci and Mary Ann Masarech, “Stop Spinning Your Wheels: Increase Employee Engagement at Your Company,” Workspan (v.51/9, 2008);
  4. Foy, Empowering People at Work (Gower, 1994);
  5. 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);
  6. Deepa Narayan-Parker, Measuring Empowerment: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (World Bank, 2005);
  7. 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);
  8. W. Thomas and B. A. Velthouse, “Cognitive Elements of Empowerment: An ‘Interpretive’ Model of Intrinsic  Task  Motivation,” Academy  of Management Review (1990);
  9. Wilkinson, “Empowerment: Theory and Practice,” Personnel Review (1998).

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