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Empowerment is a tantalizing notion that seems to offer organizations the promise of more focused, energetic, and creative work from employees. But after years of trying, many organizations have not realized the promise the idea held. This article presents some reasons why: precipitous empowerment mandates, overreliance on a narrow psychological concept of empowerment, one-size-fits-all empowerment, neglecting the needs of power sharers, a piece-meal approach, and distortions of accountability. This article offers some ways to implement empowerment programs more effectively: enlarge power, be sure of what you want to do, differentiate among employees, support power sharers, build fitting systems, and focus on results. The article contends that empowerment is still a useful concept that we need to learn to apply better.
Empowerment: An Idea Losing its Currency
Empowerment is the stepchild of a grand heritage. Its most venerable ancestor is Kurt Lewin's notion of action research,1 which departed from earlier practices by involving the subjects of change efforts in understanding and making decisions about hoped-for changes. The idea that workers might contribute to governing their own situations gained popularity with McGregor's specification of Theory X and Theory Y beliefs about human nature and their impact on how work needs to get done.2 Lickert3 described four management models that went beyond the traditional command and control structure. The work of McGregor and Lickert spawned a number of studies and experiments in the 1960s on participative management, which recognized the good will, interest, talent, and needs of employees, and encouraged open communication and cooperation between management and employees.
In the 1980s, Lawler and his colleagues4 began using the term "high-involvement" management, founded on the ideas that employees could be trusted to make decisions about their work, that they could acquire the knowledge needed to do so, and that the organization would function more effectively if they did.5 They identified levels of involvement: suggestion involvement, the capacity to offer ideas; job involvement, the permission to determine the methods of one's own job; and business or high involvement, having influence on decisions beyond one's own job that affect the business at large. Lawler and his associates identified four components of high involvement: sharing information, developing knowledge, rewarding performance, and distributing power.
Empowerment came into its own in...