Empowerment

Empowerment

Empowerment

Today, more than 70 percent of organizations have adopted some kind of empowerment

initiative for at least part of their workforce. To be successful in today’s business environment,

companies need the knowledge, ideas, energy, and creativity of every employee, from front line

workers o to the top level managers in the executive suite. The best companies accomplish this

by empowering their employees to take initiative without prodding, to serve the collective

interests of the company without being micro-managed, and to act like owners of the business.

So what is empowerment and how can it be effectively implemented in work organizations?

Social-structural empowerment

 The roots of the social-structural perspective on empowerment stem from 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. 1 The goals of 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 away from top-down control systems toward high involvement practices where power, knowledge, information and rewards are shared with employees in the lower reaches of the organizational hierarchy. For example, management can change their 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:

1. Shared decision-making. Employees and/or teams may have input into and influence over decisions ranging form high-level strategic decisions to routine day-to-day decisions about how to do their own jobs.
2. Performance-based pay where employees share in the gains of the organization as well as are compensated for increases in their own skills and knowledge
3. 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).
4. Leadership development and training to enable them not only to do their own jobs better but also providing training in interpersonal/leadership skills and the economics of the business

Psychological empowerment

Psychological empowerment has its roots in early work on employee alienation and quality of work life. Rather than focusing on managerial practices that share power with employees at all levels, the psychological perspective is focused on how employees experience empowerment at work. This perspective refers to empowerment as the personal beliefs that employees have about their role in relation to the organization. When people are feel empowered at work, they experience four dimensions includin

1) Meaning: Meaning involves a fit between the needs of one's work role and one's beliefs,values and behaviors.

2) Competence: Competence refers to self-efficacy specific to one's work, or a belief in one's capability to perform work activities with skill.

3) Self-determination: Self-determination is a sense of choice in initiating and regulatingone's actions. It eflects a sense of autonomy over the initiation and continuation of work

behavior and processes (e.g., making decisions about work methods, pace, and effort).

4) Impact: Impact is the degree to which one can influence strategic, administrative, or

operating outcomes at work

Research on empowerment

Social structural empowerment findings

 In terms of the social-structural approach on empowerment, much of the work has been

conducted under the terms high involvement work practices and high performance work systems

and has focused on organizational level outcomes. Programmatic research on high involvement

work practices has been conducted by researchers at the Center for Effective Organizations at the

University of Southern California. Their research has shown that high involvement practices

which involve sharing power, information, knowledge, and rewards with employees at all levels

has positive outcomes for organizations, particularly in terms of improvements to employee

quality of work life, the quality of products and services, customer service, and productivity.

Broader research in the area of high performance work systems (these include employee

involvement but also things like long-term job security, flexible scheduling, and multiskilling)

shows similar findings but also document the higher labor costs that are incurred with these

practices.

Psychological empowerment findings

 Unlike the social-structural perspective where there are many different instruments which

have been used to measure empowerment, a single measure of psychological empowerment has

predominately used in empirical research. Much of the work on the psychological experience of

empowerment has been conducted at the individual level of analysis though more recent research

has examined team level empowerment. In terms of the demographics of empowerment,

employees with higher levels of education, more tenure, and greater rank report experiencing

more feelings of empowerment.

 Research suggests that when people experience empowerment at work, positive outcomes

are likely to occur. When employees experience more empowerment, they report less job strain

and more job satisfaction and organizational commitment. They are also less likely to leave the

company. But empowerment does not only affect employee attitudes, it also affects their

performance (i.e., managerial effectiveness and employee productivity/performance) and work

behaviors (i.e., innovation, upward influence, and being inspirational to others).

 Research on empowered teams also indicates positive outcomes. More empowered teams

have better process improvement, higher quality products/services, and more customer

satisfaction than less empowered teams. Empowered teams are also more proactive, less resistant

to change, satisfied with their jobs, and committed to the team and the organization.

 Recent research also suggests that empowerment is particularly important in certain kinds

of contexts. Empowerment is found to be especially important in virtual settings where people

do not have face to face interactions and must work for independently. And empowerment has

been found to be particularly important to preserve the hope and attachment of survivors during

times of organizational downsizing

Findings linking the social-structural and psychological perspectives on empowerment

Research has also examined the relationship between different elements of socialstructural

empowerment and the psychological experience of empowerment. In an array of

studies, employees experience more psychological empowerment under the following

conditions: wider spans of control between management and workers, more access to

information about the mission and performance of the organization, rewards based on individual

performance, role clarity, enriching job characteristics, and supportive organizational cultures

where employees feel valued and affirmed. Strong work relationships also enable feelings of

empowerment. Employees experience more empowerment when they have more sociopolitical

support from subordinates, peers, superiors and even customers. Employees also experience

more empowerment when their leaders are approachable and trustworthy.

While the above findings indicate that social-structural empowerment enables

psychological empowerment, the converse is also true. Employees who experience

empowerment at work seek out and shape their work contexts to further enable their

empowerment. They act to create and sustain work environments that provide social-structural

empowerment

Some key challenges in building empowerment at work

Empowerment practices are implemented with the hopes of building employee

commitment, overcoming worker dissatisfaction, and reducing absenteeism, turnover, poor

quality work, and sabotage. But all too often these implementation efforts fail to achieve their

hoped for results. Why?

First, some managers confuse empowerment with a quick fix and give up before it has

been successfully implemented. The transition from a more traditional command-and-control

system to an empowered organization requires a culture change. It is not unusual for a culture

change to take upwards of five year to stick. Culture changes take discipline, consistency, and

patience. The long-term approach necessary for successful empowerment implementation

efforts appear at odds with a business environment that requires quarterly results. This long-term

approach is especially difficult as leadership transitions bring frequent changes to the vision for

the organization.

Second, sometimes there confusion about what is meant by the term empowerment. For

example, it is not uncommon for managers to tell employees that they are empowered but not

explain what they mean by empowerment. An employee may make an assumption about what

the manager means by empowerment – he or she responds enthusiastically by making a decision

independently that they may have had to get approval for in the past. The manager responds

negatively because he or she was just looking for employees to share more ideas with them, not

actually make decisions on their own. The employee feels dejected and returns to his or her old

ways of working. As such, a key issue is for managers to be clear and explicit about what they

mean by empowerment.

Third, some mangers lack the courage to genuinely empower their people. These

managers are afraid they will lose control if they genuinely empower employees. They worry

about loose canons who are not aligned with the goals of the unit. They worry that employees

will make mistakes. They assume that they alone are the source of the best ideas. These

concerns are especially strong for managers who have spent significant time in command and

control bureaucracies. Starting with small initial steps at sharing power, setting clear limits for

empowerment, and building trusting relationships have been found to be effective mechanisms

for reducing these concerns.

fourth, some empowerment efforts fail because employees resist efforts at

empowerment. A very small percentage of employees value the simplicity of following

directions and being told what to do. Some employees have been trained and conditioned to

follow orders for much of their work lives. Taking initiative will feel counter-cultural to them,

and it takes time for them to learn to be more proactive. To empower them, managers can set up

small initiative steps to build comfort and confidence. Training and development program can

also bolster their confidence to act in more empowered ways.

Robert Adams points to the limitations of any single definition of 'empowerment', and the danger that academic or specialist definitions might take away the word and the connected practices from the very people they are supposed to belong to. Still, he offers a minimal definition of the term: 'Empowerment: the capacity of individuals, groups and/or communities to take control of their circumstances, exercise power and achieve their own goals, and the process by which, individually and collectively, they are able to help themselves and others to maximize the quality of their lives.

Sociological empowerment often addresses members of groups that social discrimination processes have excluded from decision-making processes through – for example – discrimination based on disability, race, ethnicity, religion, or gender. Empowerment as a methodology is also associated with feminism.

Process

Empowerment is the process of obtaining basic opportunities for marginalized people, either directly by those people, or through the help of non-marginalized others who share their own access to these opportunities. It also includes actively thwarting attempts to deny those opportunities. Empowerment also includes encouraging, and developing the skills for, self-sufficiency, with a focus on eliminating the future need for charity or welfare in the individuals of the group. This process can be difficult to start and to implement effectively.

Strategy

One empowerment strategy is to assist marginalized people to create their own nonprofit organization, using the rationale that only the marginalized people, themselves, can know what their own people need most, and that control of the organization by outsiders can actually help to further entrench marginalization. Charitable organizations lead from outside of the community, for example, can disempower the community by entrenching a dependence charity or welfare. A nonprofit organization can target strategies that cause structural changes, reducing the need for ongoing dependence. Red Cross, for example, can focus on improving the health of indigenous people, but does not have authority in its charter to install water-delivery and purification systems, even though the lack of such a system profoundly, directly and negatively impacts health. A nonprofit composed of the indigenous people, however, could ensure their own organization does have such authority and could set their own agendas, make their own plans, seek the needed resources, do as much of the work as they can, and take responsibility – and credit – for the success of their projects (or the consequences, should they fail).

Legal

Legal empowerment happens when marginalised people or groups use the legal mobilisation i.e., law, legal systems and justice mechanisms to improve or transform their social, political or economic situations. Legal empowerment approaches are interested in understanding how they can use the law to advance interests and priorities of the marginalised

According to 'Open society foundations' (an NGO) "Legal empowerment is about strengthening the capacity of all people to exercise their rights, either as individuals or as members of a community. Legal empowerment is about grass root justice, about ensuring that law is not confined to books or courtrooms, but rather is available and meaningful to ordinary people

Womens

 empowerment has become a significant topic of discussion in development and economics. It can also point to approaches regarding other trivialized genders in a particular political or social context.

Women's economic empowerment refers to the ability for women to enjoy their rights to control and benefit from resources, assets, income and their own time, as well as the ability to manage risk and improve their economic status and wellbeing

While often interchangeably used, the more comprehensive concept of gender empowerment refers to people of any gender, stressing the distinction between biological sex and gender as a role. It thereby also refers to other marginalized genders in a particular political or social contex

Economic benefits

Most women across the globe rely on the informal work sector for an income. If women were empowered to do more and be more, the possibility for economic growth becomes apparent. Empowering women in developing countries is essential to reduce global poverty since women represent most of the world's poor populationEliminating a significant part of a nation's work force on the sole basis of gender can have detrimental effects on the economy of that nationIn addition, female participation in counsels, groups, and businesses is seen to increase

Barriers

Many of the barriers to women's empowerment and equity lie ingrained in cultural norms. Many women feel these pressures, while others have become accustomed to being treated inferior to men. Even if men, legislators, NGOs, etc. are aware of the benefits women's empowerment and participation can have, many are scared of disrupting the status quo and continue to let societal norms get in the way of development

Workplace

many organizational theorists and practitioners regard employee empowerment as one of the most important and popular management concepts of our time.

In management

In the sphere of management and organizational theory, "empowerment" often refers loosely to processes for giving subordinates (or workers generally) greater discretion and resources: distributing control in order to better serve both customers and the interests of employing organizations

the three keys that managers must use to empower their employees are:

1)     SHARE INFORMATION WITH EVERYONE

2)     CREATE AUTONOMY THROUGH BOUNDARIES

3)     REPLACE THE OLD HIERARCHY WITH SELF-MANAGED TEAMS