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Keywords Empowerment, Environmental impact assessment, Human resource management
Abstract The purpose of the present research is to develop a reliable and valid scale to distinguish and measure the three environmental factors of dynamic structural framework, control of workplace decisions, and fluidity in information sharing that are conceptually related to and affect an employee's perception of empowerment. By quantifying the environmental factors that facilitate empowerment through a valid and reliable scale human resource departments will be provided with information that will suggest environmental changes they can implement to improve perceptions of empowerment on the Part of employees. Strengths and weaknesses of the scale developed, the organizational empowerment scale, are also discussed.
Pervasive in the empowerment literature is the conclusion that an empowered workforce will lead to achieving a competitive advantage (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Forrester, 2000; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997; Sundbo, 1999; Thomas, 2000). If one accepts that conclusion, it becomes important to know how a company determines what should be done in order to increase employee perception of empowerment.
With the varying views of empowerment within the business context, several definitions of empowerment have been produced (e.g. Leslie et al., 1998; Randolph, 1995; Spreitzer, 1995; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990; Wilkinson, 1998). Spreitzer (1997), after an extensive review of the literature, defined two general perspectives of empowerment within a business context, the relational perspective and the psychological perspective. Relational empowerment has been referred to in the literature as top-down processing (Conger and Kanungo, 1988) as well as mechanistic (Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997; Wilkinson, 1998). It is the belief that empowerment occurs when higher levels within a hierarchy share power with lower levels within the same hierarchy (Siegall and Gardner, 2000; Spreitzer, 1997; Wilkinson, 1998), and is the most widely studied perspective. The relational perspective maintains that it is the implementation of new processes and the distribution of power that empower employees. On the other hand, the psychological perspective of empowerment focuses on the employee's perception of empowerment (Spreitzer, 1995, 1997; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990). Researchers studying psychological empowerment, also known as organic or bottom-up processing, maintain that empowerment is achieved only when psychological states produce a perception of empowerment within the employee (Mishra and Spreitzer, 1998; Quinn and Spreitzer, 1997; Wilkinson, 1998).
The present authors...