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The importance of empowerment has grown in the past decades. Empowerment frees up management 's time from minor decision and can focus on broader strategies and the long-term objectives of the company. This paper aims to contribute empirically to the research of empowerment across cultures in manufacturing environment, focusing on how national culture dimensions affect structural and psychological empowerment and employee engagement. The data base on a practitioner's model on sustainable engagement, in which both constructs of empowerment and sustainable engagement were surveyed and measured in a global manufacturing company for its group companies across more than 20 national cultures.
Keywords: Structural Empowerment, Psychological Empowerment, Employee Engagement, Culture Dimensions
INTRODUCTION
The importance of empowerment is well recognized and has grown in the past decades. Smith stated that the importance of empowerment grows and "goes hand in hand with social changes, with what technology enables us to do and with the demands of the competitive environment." (Smith, 1996, p.12). Baird et al. suggest that organizations' ability to respond quickly to changes in the environment is becoming more important and empowering employees can contribute to that objective as it reduces time caused by the unnecessary communication up and down the organization (Baird et al., 2010). They argue that empowerment frees up management's time from minor decision, and can focus on broader strategies and the long-term objectives of the company, which is important for the sustainable business growth (Baird et al., 2010).
Some studies have shown that empowering leadership behaviors, characterized by the redistributing decision-making power to those who usually do not have it and gives employees more power to make their own decisions, contribute statistically significantly to employee engagement and low turnover intention (e.g. Albrecht and Andreetta, 2011), and organizational performance (e.g. Baird et al., 2018). Mathieu et al. argue that empowering employees should enable organizations to become more flexible and responsive (Mathieu et al., 2016). Therefore, empowerment can lead to improvements in both individual and organizational performance. A number of studies on psychological empowerment have demonstrated its desirable outcomes for organizations, for example a direct relationship between psychological empowerment and managerial effectiveness and innovative behaviors (Spreitzer, 1995), or its mediating effect on structural empowerment and individual performance and employee job satisfaction (eg Seibert et al.,...