Thread by @drlouisehansen

Empowerment at Work: Over the last two decades, two complementary perspectives on empowerment at work have emerged. The first focuses on the social structural conditions that enable empowerment in the workplace, 1/29 #March4Justice #EnoughIsEnough

and the second focuses on the psychological experience of empowerment at work. Each perspective plays an important role in empowering employees and is described in the sections below: 2/29

Social-Structural Empowerment: found in theories of social exchange and social power. The emphasis is on building more democratic organisations through the sharing of power between superiors and subordinates, 3/29

with the goal of cascading power to lower levels of the organisational hierarchy. In this perspective, power means having formal authority or control over organisational resources and the ability to make decisions relevant to a person’s job or role. 4/29

The goals of the social-structural perspective focus on understanding how organisational, institutional, social, economic, political, and cultural forces can root out the conditions that foster powerlessness in the workplace. 5/29

Practically, organisations can change 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 hierarchy. 6/38

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. 7/29

However, this 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. 8/29

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. 9/29

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, it examines how employees experience empowerment at work. 10/29

When people feel empowered at work, they experience four dimensions: Meaning: a fit between the needs of one’s work role and one’s beliefs, values, and behaviors; 11/29

Competence: self-efficacy specific to one’s work, or a belief in one’s capability to perform work activities with skill; Self-determination: a sense of choice in initiating and regulating one’s actions. 12/29

A sense of autonomy over the initiation and continuation of work behavior and processes (e.g. methods, pace, and effort); Impact: the degree to which one can influence strategic, administrative, or operating outcomes at work. 13/29

For example, if people have discretion to make decisions (i.e., self-determination) but they don’t care about the kinds of decisions they can make (i.e., they lack a sense of meaning), they will not feel empowered. 14/29

Alternatively, if people believe they can make an impact but don’t feel like they have the skills and abilities to do their job well (i.e., they lack a sense of competence), they also will not feel empowered. 15/29

Social-Structural Empowerment Findings: Research has shown that high-involvement practices that involve sharing power, information, knowledge, and rewards with employees at all levels have positive outcomes for organisations, 16/29

in employee quality of work life, the quality of products and services, customer service, productivity, long-term job security, flexible scheduling, and multi-skilling, but also documents the costs that are incurred with these practices. 17/29

Psychological Empowerment Findings:
When people experience empowerment at work, positive outcomes are likely to occur: less job strain, more job satisfaction, more commitment and less likely to leave the company. 18/29

But empowerment not affect only employees’ attitudes; it also affects their performance (i.e., managerial effectiveness and employee productivity/performance) and work behaviors (i.e., innovation, influence, being inspirational to others). 19/29

Linking the Social-Structural and Psychological Empowerment: Employees experience more psychological empowerment under the following conditions: wider spans of control between management and workers, more access to information about the mission 20/29

and performance of the organisation, rewards based on individual performance, role clarity, enriching job characteristics, and supportive organisational cultures in which employees feel valued and affirmed. 21/29

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. 22/29

Employees also experience more empowerment when their leaders are approachable and trustworthy. Personal empowerment at work can also create and sustain work environments that provide social-structural empowerment. 23/29

Challenges in Building Empowerment: 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 organisation requires a culture change. 24/29

Second, sometimes there is confusion about what is meant by the term empowerment. An employee may make an incorrect assumption about what the manager means by empowerment. Managers need to be clear and explicit about what they mean by empowerment. 25/29

Third, some managers 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 cannons who are not aligned with the goals of the unit. 26/29

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. 27/29

And fourth, some employees resist efforts at empowerment. Some employees have been trained and conditioned to follow orders for much of their work lives. Taking initiative will feel countercultural to them. 28/29

Culture changes take discipline, consistency, patience.

Source: Psychology/IResearchNet/Industrial Organisational-Psychology/Work-Motivation/Empowerment. (2021). Unknown author. This piece was adapted to be Twitter friendly. This thread does not include the entire piece. 29/29