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ABSTRACT
Employee Empowerment is a key to success for today's organizations. Employee Empowerment not only helps the organizations in achieving their goals but also helps to frame the mission of the organization. The concept of Employee empowerment started with delegation. After that the concept was expanded a lot by continuous research in this area and innovative practices adopted by companies to empower their employees. The objective of the conceptual paper is to discuss how the concept of employee empowerment has evolved over several decades and how it is being practiced by different leading organizations today. The paper also discusses the benefits of employee empowerment and it concludes with some prescriptions for successfully implementing employee empowerment in the emerging market.
Key words: Employee empowerment, emerging market, organizational practices, benefits of employee empowerment
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Currently, organizations are giving lots of emphasis on employee empowerment as it has been realized that this is one of the keys to their success. Studies have found around the globe that business managers accept "people" as their biggest and the most valuable asset to the organization3. Therefore, Organizations in this competitive world believe that employee empowerment will help them in achieving the desired level of productivity in lesser amount of time (The Saylor Foundation, 2014).
Employee Empowerment is a philosophy as well as a strategy where employees are given a certain degree of autonomy to take initiative and make decisions to solve problems related to their jobs. In employee empowerment the single-handed decision making by the manager moves to employee level and it makes the employees accountable for their work as well. Consequently, they become more responsible and help in delivering better quality of work.
It is also stated as a "management practice of sharing information, rewards and power with employees so that they can take initiative and make decisions to solve problems and improve service and performance"4. However, the main aim of employee empowerment in an organization is to create a work environment where people are motivated, productive and happy. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the concept of employee empowerment has evolved over several decades and how it is being practiced by different leading organizations; and what are the benefits of employee empowerment. Finally, to...