EMPLOYEE EMPOWERMENT IN TRANSFORMED ORGANISATION

Employee Empowerment in a Transformed Organisation

Employee Empowerment in a Transformed Organisation

Introduction

It is difficult to ignore the current interest in the idea of empowerment. As Wilkinson (1988) argues, empowerment is portrayed as the way in which organisations can move from a static and rule-bound past to a dynamic and flexible future. In Walton's (1985) terms, empowerment allows an organisation's relationship with its employees to move from control to commitment. Looked at in this way, empowerment can be seen as the most recent manifestation of the idea that employee involvement is the means by which an organisation and its performance can be transformed (Cunningham et al., 1996; Wilkinson, 1998).

Meaning and Concept of Empowerment

The meaning of empowerment has been the subject of great debate and remains, at present, a poorly defined concept (Cunningham et al., 1996; Dainty et al., 2002; Psoinos and Smithson, 2002). Mondros and Wilson (1994), and Russ and Millam (1995) similarly argued that the term is rarely defined clearly and is a frequently used rhetorically. One possible reason for this lack of clarity is the tendency for empowerment to be attached to management concepts, for example, business process re-engineering (BPR) and total quality management (TQM) (Dainty et al., 2002). Furthermore, the term empowerment represents a wide variety of activities, from “sham” empowerment (Rosenthal et al., 1997) to a high level of involvement and devolution of power. Similarly, Wilkinson (1998) identified five types of empowerment: information sharing; upward problem solving; task autonomy; attitudinal shaping; and self-management.

The original meaning of empowerment has been referred to as to “authorise, give power to” (Tulloch, 1993). The use of the term “power” appears to be common throughout the definitions of empowerment; for example, Legge (1995) argued that empowerment should be seen in terms of a redistribuitive model whereby power equalisation is promoted for trust and collaboration.

Other authors in the field define empowerment in terms of its dynamic interaction, for example Pastor (1996, p. 5) stated that: “it is part of a process or an evolution - an evolution that goes on whenever you have two or more people in a relationship, personally or professionally”. Lee and Koh (2001) refined this description further by looking at the intersubjective nature of the subordinate and supervisor. They stated that empowerment is the combination of the psychological state of a subordinate, which is influenced by the empowering behaviours of supervisors.

The concept of empowerment, as currently construed, is not of course without its critics. For some it represents no more than a rhetorically constructed smoke-screen behind which lies a more sophisticated way of exploiting employees (see e.g. Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992). Even amongst those more favourably inclined, it is conceded that the idea too often lacks both theoretical clarity and empirical backing (Cunningham et al., 1996; Wilkinson, 1998). Furthermore, the prescriptive literature trivialises the conflict that exists within organisations and ignores the context within which empowerment takes place (Marchington, 1995). Thus, if we take a closer look, we find that empowerment takes place within the context ...