Employee

Empowerment

Introduction
Importance
Factors
Case Study
Activity

What Empowerment Is?

Responsibility and Ownership.
Working independently towards common objectives.
Understanding Why? so that guidelines can be
applied.
Weighing the impact of decisions on all affected
stakeholders.
An earned privilege. It is not a given right!!

Definition
To empower, means to enable, to allow or to permit, and
can be conceived as both self-initiated and initiated by
others.
It can be defined as:
Empowerment is the process of enabling employees to set
their own work-related goals, make decisions and solve
problems within their spheres of responsibility and authority.
Empowerment is the process of sharing power with
employees.
Bateman & Snell: 2003

I LOVE MY WORK
AND
I LOVE WHERE I WORK

Give Power Away

You have to give power to gain power.

How To Give Power Away

Assign important tasks.

Provide autonomy and discretion.
Give visibility and recognition.
Help build strong relationships.

Need of Empowerment

Time to respond is short

First line employees must make many decisions.
There is great-untapped potential.
Employees feel much more control over their lives.
Empowered people do not feel like victims.

CHARACTERISTICS OF EMPOWERMENT

1. Employees feel empowered and respected

2. Process of personal development
3. Different from delegation of authority
4. Employees are trusted and valued
5. Open and responsive culture
6. Employee assumes managerial and staff responsibility
7. Empowering not means someone else to loose it.

MANAGERS RESPONSIBILITIES
1. Actions must speak louder than words
2. Trust people
3. Give challenging work
4. Seek answers from employees
5. Allow employees to play a bigger role

CONDITIONS
1. Participation: workers
initiative.

must be

encouraged to take the

2. Innovation: management must encourage employees to try out

new ideas and make decisions
3. Information: employees must have free access to information
and resources that they need to nurture their talents.
4. Accountability: empowered employees should be held
accountable for results is to see that they are giving their best
efforts.

CORE DIMENSIONS

SELF- EFFICACY
1. A sense of personal competence
2. Belief that I have the ability to perform the task
3. Belief that I am capable of putting forth the effort
4. Belief

that no outside obstacles will prevent me from

accomplishing the task

SELF-DETERMINATION
1. To be self determined means to experience a sense of
choice in initiating and regulating ones own actions
2. A sense of personal choice
3. Choices about the effort to be expended
4. Choices about the pace of the work

PERSONAL CONSEQUENCES
1. Sense of having impact
2. Impact is the degree to which an individual can
influence

strategic,

administrative,

or

operating

outcomes at work
3. Feeling of active control-brings the environment into
alignment with wishes
4. Feeling of passive control- wishes are brought onto
alignment with the environment

TRUST
1. Sense of security
2. Feeling that I shall be treated fairly and equitably
3. Encourage the development of relationship
4. Allows people to act in a confident and straight
forward manner

Ways of Employee Empowerment

1. Express confidence in employees abilities.
2. Hold
high
expectations
concerning
their
performance.
3. Allow employees to participate in the decisionmaking process.
4. Allow employees freedom and autonomy in how they
perform their jobs.
5. Use position power in a positive way and limit the
use of coercive power.
6. Set inspirational and managerial goals for
employees.

Significance of Empowerment
1. Enhances beliefs of employees that they are
influential contributors to the organizational success.
2. Employees perceive meaning in work.
3. Employees feel competent.
4. Employees derive a sense of self-determination.
5. Employees believe that they have an impact on
important decisions.

Pre-requisites of Employee Empowerment

Involvement
Quick decision-making
Solving complex problems
360-degree Feedback
Variable Rewards with some Group Component
Error Tolerance
Enhanced Communication
Generalists Managers and Employees
Trust and Support of Management

EMPOWERMENT PROCESS

FACILITATORS OF EMPOWERED
TEAM
ORGANIZATION
STRUCTURE JOB
DESIGN

HUMAN RESOURCES
SYSTEMS (EG: REWARDS,
TRAINING)

EMPOWERMENT

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
ACTIONS

COMPETITIVE QUALITY
PRODUCTIVITY
CUSTOMER SERVICE

ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES/
LEADERSHIP ACTION

Degrees of Empowerment
1. Total management control- No employee
discretion
2. Participatory
managementmanagement generally controls the
work & the context, but allow
employees to make some decisions
(typically minor ones)
3. Self-managementEmployees
make
most decisions pertaining to their work
and work setting

Organizational improvement
through employee empowerment
First, empowerment can strengthen motivation by
providing employees with the opportunity to attain
intrinsic rewards from their work, such as a greater sense
of accomplishment and a feeling of importance.
Intrinsic rewards such as job satisfaction and a sense of
purposeful work can be more powerful than extrinsic
rewards such as higher wages or bonuses.
The second means by which employee empowerment can
increase productivity is through better decisions.
Especially when decisions require task-specific knowledge,
those on the front line can often better identify problems.

TOYOTA
Toyota Motor Company empowers
some of its employees to identify and
help remedy problems occurring during
product assembly. An automobile coming
off Toyota's assembly line with a paint
defect is seen as an opportunity to delve
into the root cause of the defect, as
opposed to merely fixing the defect and
passing it on to distributors for resale.

Challenge
Please
Pleasewrite
write One
OneWord
WordFor
For
EMPOWERMENT
EMPOWERMENT

Does empowerment work?

TRUE or FALSE?