Empowerment

Social-Structural Empowerment

The roots of the social-structural perspective on empowerment are found in theories of social exchange and social power. The emphasis is on building more democratic organizations through the sharing of power between superiors and subordinates, with the goal of cascading power to lower levels of the organizational hierarchy. In this perspective, power means having formal authority or control over organizational resources and the ability to make decisions relevant to a person's job or role. In short, social structural empowerment is about employee participation through increased delegation of responsibility down throughout the organizational chain of command.

The goals of the social-structural perspective focus on understanding how organizational, institutional, social, economic, political, and cultural forces can root out the conditions that foster powerlessness in the workplace. Practically, organizations can change organizational policies, processes, practices, and structures from top-down control systems to high involvement practices in which power, knowledge, information, and rewards are shared with employees in the lower reaches of the organizational hierarchy. For example, management can change its policy to allow employees to decide on their own how they will recover from a service problem and surprise and delight customers by exceeding their expectations rather than waiting for approval from a supervisor.

Specific practices that exemplify a high involvement system include the following:

• Shared decision making. Employees and/or teams may have input into and influence over decisions ranging from high-level strategic decisions to routine day-to-day decisions about how to do their own jobs.
• Performance-based pay. Employees share in the gains of the organization and are compensated for increases in their own skills and knowledge.
• Open flow of information. This includes the downward flow of information (about strategic direction, competitive intelligence, and financial performance) and the upward flow of information (concerning employee attitudes and improvement ideas).
• Leadership development and training. Training enables leaders to do their own jobs better and also may provide interpersonal/leadership skills and knowledge of the economics of the business.

However, although this perspective has garnered much attention by practitioners because it helps them see how the kinds of managerial actions can facilitate empowerment at work, it is limited because it provides an organization-centric perspective on empowerment. It does not address the nature of empowerment as experienced by employees. This is important because in some situations, power, knowledge, information, and rewards were shared with employees yet they still felt disempowered. And in other situations, individuals lacked all the objective features of an empowering work environment yet still felt and acted in empowered ways. This limitation helped to spur the emergence of the psychological perspective on empowerment, which is described in the next section.

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