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Abstract
Employee empowerment has become a popular management strategy and many managers and professional in various organizations claim to be practicing it. The objective of this study was to assess the construct validity and internal consistency of the Psychological Empowerment Questionnaire (PEQ) by administrating the questionnaire to employees in selected private higher education institutions in Republic of Macedonia. Psychological empowerment comprising four cognitive dimensions i.e. meaning, competence, self-determination and impact in the context of private higher education institutions is being validated using exploratory factor analysis. It is recommended that management of higher education institutions can use these findings and use the PEQ to measure the psychological empowerment and hence to improve the level of psychological empowerment of the employees.
Keywords: management; employee; private higher education; psychological empowerment; academia JEL Classifications: J5, L6, M00, M54
INTRODUCTION
Employee empowerment is considered by many organizational theorists and practitioners to be one of the most important and popular management concepts of our time. Empowerment of the employees in the workplace provides them with opportunities to make their own decisions with regards to their tasks. Today many managers are practicing the concept of empowerment among their subordinates to provide them with better opportunities. Companies ranging from small to large and from low-technology manufacturing concerns to high-tech software firms have been initiating empowerment programs in attempts to enhance employee motivation, increase efficiency, and gain competitive advantages in the turbulent contemporary business environment. Empowerment is a desirable management and organizational style that enables employees to practice autonomy, control their own jobs, and use their skills and abilities to benefit both their organization and themselves.
The word "empower" has potency and strength. Similar to the concept of "motivation," the most common misuse of the idea of empowerment is that one person can empower another. Empowerment is an inner-to-outer dynamic, most useful when preceded by silence and awareness of inner guidance. Empowerment is not simply another way to "get" something, it's a condition that supports you in living life fully. It is the process of providing production and managerial guidelines, and then allowing employees to make the day-to-day decisions that affect their job duties. Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behaves, take action, and control work and...