Empowerment

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 Bar-tunek 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 [Page 592]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.

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