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Introduction
Various external challenges have forced people and their organizations to change. First, customers have developed and their expectations are high quality, low prices and good services. Second, the forces of change are brought on by global competition. Third, the members of today's work force are very different from past. They have great potential for growth and development but are impatient and want to control their own destinies. [1] Consequently, the way businesses have to be managed has changed significantly over the last 50 years.
In these days, organizational leaders are looking for new ways to improve the creative potential of their workforce to continue to exist in this competitive environment. As with total quality management and re-engineering, empowerment has become one of the mantras of the 10s. Empowerment may be a possible survival solution for firms facing increasing competitive pressures and changing workforce dynamics. []
Employee motivation is very critical in a competitive environment because companies can attain sustainable competitive advantage by motivating their workforce. Firms try to motivate their employees to produce a better quality product at a lower cost and have a more stable working environment. One of the newest ways that firms have endeavored to increase the motivational levels of their employees is to empower them. []
Definition of Empowerment
With the varying views of empowerment within the business context, different definitions of empowerment have been produced. One of them is written below
"It will be defined as the involvement of employees in the decision-making process inviting the members of the organization to think strategically and to be personally responsible for the quality of their tasks, animating, favoring and rewarding employees for behaving always in a way they consider more suitable to satisfy customers and to improve the organisation's functioning.[5]"
There are two general viewpoints of empowerment in a business context, the relational perspective and the psychological perspective. Relational empowerment is defined in literature as top-down processing as well as mechanistic. According to this perspective, empowerment occurs when higher levels share power with lower levels within the same hierarchy. Contrarily, the psychological perspective of empowerment focuses on the employee's perception of empowerment. It is also known as bottom-up processing. According to this perspective, empowerment is achieved only when psychological states produce a perception of empowerment within the employee. []
Benefits of Empowerment
It is proposed that empowerment provides a high degree of flexibility and tolerance of diversity, while giving senior management retention eventual business control. It is revealed that empowered employees are provided with the necessary resources and autonomy to continuously try hard for innovation and to be able to respond to change. [6] Leaders use the empowerment as a management tool to increase the performance capacity of people in any organization.
Most of the reports state that the companies whose employees have more control and responsibility over their jobs achieve a greater return on sales than those companies that do not give control and responsibility to their employees. [1]
Limitations to empowerment
"empowerment is voluntary but not optional", [4]
The quote above makes the first point of the limitations to empowerment. It demands the voluntary exercise of employees' capacities, but there is no option to refuse this demand, ie once a company has decided to use empowerment all employees have to do it. The second point is that delegation of tasks is not all about managers letting the employees handle all the decisions. It is a special manager-subordinate relationship within the formal structure of the organization. Managers can often hesitate to delegate for various reasons. Some of them include
· difficulty depending on others
· fear of subordinates doing a poor job
· or doing a good job and outperforming the employer
· "I can do it better myself"-mentality
· inability to direct and provide proper training
· lack of selective controls, i.e. no clearly defined parameters for the problem
· a risk aversion temperament
Employees might also resist taking on responsibility. This may stem from a sense of not being properly trained for the tasks they need to perform. Other problems include
· lack of self-esteem
· a sense of not having any influence in the organization
· or not being listened to
· resentment towards management, not wanting to help
· not being group-oriented. Empowerment requires working with people
Sometimes empowerment just does not mesh well with the organizational culture. The organization which implements empowerment needs a culture that is high-trust, high-risk taking and that is participative. One of the main principles in empowerment is that you have to share information. Information is often viewed as power and therefore people might withhold it from each other.
If you use empowerment as a quick fix for problems in the organizations you will not get the results you want. Delegation can go wrong in many ways, as we have seen in the Ferris-Turner case. Excessive company bureaucracy can also have a negative effect on empowerment.
Another important consideration before you implement empowerment is to think about which culture your co-workers come from. Depending on which culture they are from, people cope differently with responsibilities. A worker from China might feel uneasy about the decentralized decision-making that follows with empowerment.
There is also the problem of measuring degrees of empowerment and its outcome. You just don't know what you are doing right or wrong. Your output may increase but it is difficult to say something about which factor in the process that was critical.
In a way, empowerment is the opposite of a rigid hierarchy. Hierarchies do fulfill some need for order and security. At least in a hierarchy, you usually know your position and what is expected of you. They also provide clear markers that let us know how fast and how far we are climbing. Many of us want to be evaluated and hierarchies offer us report cards. We depend on structures as a kind of protective parent guarding us against the dangers of the world. True, it might not be as exciting and challenging to be a regular employee compared to being the executive, but with decision-making follows responsibility. You are responsible for making the right decisions and you will suffer the consequences if you make a wrong decision. When it comes to dealing with a dissatisfied customer, in the service industry for example, you can't just send them to your supervisor and let him or her deal with the problem. Service recovery often needs to be done immediately. But many employees might not feel ready to deal with an angry customer. It feels safer to refer them to your superiors.
The conclusion is that there will always be some level of hierarchy. Hierarchies fulfill so many needs and there will always be some level of management who defines problems and hand out tasks to be solved. But if your organizational culture mixes well with empowerment and if you can find out a way to go around all the problems aforementioned, empowerment might prove to be just the thing your organization needs.
REFENRENCES
1. Blanchard, K., Carlos, J.P., Randolp A. 1, The Keys to Empowerment, Berret-Koehler Publishers Inc., San Fransisco.
. Johnson, D., Thurston, E. 17, "Leadership & Organization Development Journal", Achieving empowerment strategy grid, vol.18, no., pp.647.
. Matthew, R., Diaz, W., Cole, S. 00,"Personnel Review", The Organizational Empowerment Scale, Vol., No., pp. 7-18.
4. Claydon, T., Doyle, M., "Personnel Review", Trusting me, trusting you? The ethics of employee empowerment, Vol. 5, No. 6, 16, pp. 1-5.
5. Pardo Del Val, M., Lloyd, B.00, "Leadership & Organization Development Journal", Measuring Empowerment, Vol.4, No., pp.10-108.
6. Holt, G., Love, P., Nesan, L., 000, "Team Performance Management An International Journal", Employee empowerment in Construction an implementation model for process improvement, Volume 6 . Number ¾, pp. 47-51.
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