Content area
Full Text
Marc Siegall: California State University, Chico, California, USA
Susan Gardner: California State University, Chico, California, USA
Introduction
Many managers and scholars recognize that an organization's only true sustainable competitive advantage is its people, and that all organizational members need to be involved and active for the firm to succeed (e.g. Lawler, 1992, 1996). The concept of empowerment is closely aligned with this thrust to gain organizational effectiveness through the wise utilization of human resources. Conger and Kanungo (1988) pointed out that empowerment "is a principle component of managerial and organizational effectiveness ... [and] empowerment techniques play a crucial role in group development and maintenance" (p. 471). With more organizations relying on team-based designs (Parker, 1994), empowerment becomes important at both the individual and team levels. Unfortunately, empowerment programs have not always proven effective (e.g. Griggs and Manring, 1991; Thorlakson and Murray, 1996); therefore, a better understanding of which factors positively influence empowerment would be useful.
In this paper, we examined the impact of four contextual/organizational elements on four factors that have been shown to comprise the psychological side of empowerment. We looked at the relationships between employees' perceptions of their work environment and their reported sense of empowerment. Our general research question was whether these contextual factors affected each psychological component in the same way. We also sought to contribute to the literature that utilizes a specific (psychological based) conceptualization of empowerment. Our goal is to contribute to both the academic and practitioner literatures.
While there are multiple meanings of empowerment (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Wilkinson, 1998), in practice empowered employees have a high sense of self-efficacy, are given significant responsibility and authority over their jobs, engage in upward influence, and see themselves as innovative (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Ford and Fottler, 1995; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997). Empowered employees view themselves as more effective in their work and are evaluated as more effective by their co-workers (Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997). Numerous articles and books (e.g. Byham and Cox, 1990) attest to the power of empowerment to increase organizational effectiveness and employee well-being. For example, empowering employees has been shown to improve efficiency and reduce costs on the assembly line in a transmission plant (Suzik, 1998). Furthermore, empowering employees affected employee satisfaction, loyalty, performance, service delivery,...