In this zone, we critically discuss the construct of employee empowerment and evaluate whether it is managerial rhetoric or organisational reality.
According to Cunningham et al.,45 the 1980s and 90s witnessed a rise in the implementation of employee involvement schemes, such as employee participation, participative management and participative decisionmaking, 46 with the intent of increasing individuals’ commitment to their jobs and employer while engendering a culture of inclusion and flexibility.
They argue that employee empowerment is a contemporary manifestation of involvement and typifies a conscious move away from the philosophy of Taylorist scientific management control to augmenting commitment as a strategy to enhance organisational performance. Appelbaum et al.47 and Honold48 profess that employee empowerment is a constantly evolving, multidimensional concept, which is subject to multiple interpretation and application, depending on the context, corporate culture and organisational actors involved. They thus attest that these factors conflate to make defining empowerment inherently problematic.

Although theorists have made progress in developing the employee empowerment construct, Fernandez and Moldogaziev49 profess that disagreement is still rife among the research community about what it means and how it translates, in practical terms, in organisations.
With its intellectual roots planted firmly in the human relations movement, employee empowerment is defined by Ghosh50 as ‘the process of shifting authority and responsibility to employees at a lower level in the organisational hierarchy. It is a transfer of power from the managers to their subordinates.’ In a similar vein, Conger and Kanungo51. Suggest it is ‘the process by which a leader or manager shares his or her power with subordinates.’ In this context, power is ‘interpreted as the possession of formal authority or control over organisational resources’ which, they argue, emphasises the notion of both parties sharing authority between them. The Oxford Living Dictionary Online52 also likens empowerment with the assignment of authority and power, but also relates the concept to delegation, authorisation and entitlement. However, its definition of delegation does not suggest the relinquishing of power from one person to another.
Although empowerment is often used interchangeably with delegation, one could argue that empowerment can be delegated, but delegation is not empowerment.
Power is a key theme running throughout the vein of these definitions and importantly, Greasley et al.53 advocate that assignment of this power is intended to ascribe individuals with a greater level of responsibility, flexibility and freedom to make workrelated decisions and implement them, without the shackles of Taylorist control. Such empowerment, according to Greasley et al., encourages autonomy and heightens job satisfaction.
Lee and Koh54 view empowerment as a paradigm shift from, but not a substitute for, motivation schemes, such as job enrichment55.
Extant literature proffers that there are two distinct, and one could argue, competing perspectives of employee empowerment: structural and psychological, which Greasley et al. attest appears to have been researched as separate rather than complimentary concepts. First, structural empowerment encompasses a redistribution of power from managers to individuals via enabling organisational structures, policies and practices that are intended to engender collaboration and trust between parties in the people–organisation relationship through power sharing. While it may be a positive move by the organisation to be more inclusive and give individuals the opportunity to be involved in managing its business operations, Greasley et al. and Mills and Ungson56 suggest that structural empowerment poses a quandary for managers. Its successfulness is dependent on their ability to alleviate the tension between relinquished control, and a certain amount of power, with the important task of achieving congruence between individual and organisational goals.
Second, psychological empowerment centres on an individual’s emotional state and their cognition of, and the meaning they assign to, the completion of work tasks.57 The perspective encompasses four aspects. First, the fit between their work roles and personal values. Second, their competence in, and belief in their ability to, perform the job. Third, selfdetermination or perception of autonomy on the job, and fourth, impact or the sense of influence they may have over job outcomes. Peccei and Rosenthal57 point out that overarching this is the individual’s belief that they have the requisite skills and abilities to complete the tasks for which they have been empowered. On this point, Dainty et al.46 caveat that an individual can only feel empowered if they believe they have been empowered. Therefore, perceptions that are subjective and socially constructed, play a major role in the empowerment experience. Managers need to bear this in mind when implementing structural empowerment programmes and ensure that the rhetoric of empowerment is translated to reality and psychological issues are not overlooked.53 Greasley et al. posit that the espoused benefits that can be derived from employee empowerment appear to be heavily skewed towards the organisation, which may, arguably, suggest that managers have implemented such initiatives for the organisation’s benefit, not the individual.45 Employee empowerment benefits individuals by increasing their motivation, skill utilisation, job satisfaction levels, capacity to innovate and loyalty to the organisation.58 Foster Fishman and Keys59 espouse that management efforts to implement employee empowerment is doomed to fail unless the organisation’s culture engenders inclusion and trust, encourages and tolerates risk taking and supports its staff to ‘take delegated power’ and exercise control over the work to be undertaken. This includes giving them discretionary choice in how the work is done and appropriate access to information, knowledge and resources. Honold48 contends that ‘employee empowerment will not happen naturally in organisations’ as too many disabling and ‘disempowering structures have been built into them over the years.’ Arguably, this suggests that a culture of disempowerment is institutionalised and inherent within the organisation’s culture.
Mills and Ungson profess that the organisation’s need to foster greater commitment among the workforce through empowerment is juxtaposed with the necessity to coordinate and control. The authors suggest that this juxtaposition can be overcome via two mechanisms:
organisational constitution and trust. First, organisational constitution is a ‘set of agreements and understandings that define the limits and goals of the group.Œ.Œ.Œas well as the responsibilities and rights of participants’60 These are the tacit, implied, unwritten work rules that operate through the organisation’s culture. Rather than stifling empowered individuals, it moderates the relationship between the expectations of the empowered and organisational requirements of empowerment itself.56 Second, trust, which the MerriamWebster Dictionary Online61 defines as ‘assured reliance on the character, ability, strength or truth of someone or something . . . to place confidence in. . .’ It relates trust to faith, acceptance and integrity. Mills and Ungson profess that trust, in its various interpretations, is imperative within empowerment as it enables those empowered to enact their imbued authority and, ostensibly, power, with ability, discretion and confidence and without the need for contracts and formal control mechanisms.
One could argue that parallels can be drawn between organisational constitution and trust with aspects of the relational psychological contract, which is also based on trust, mutual obligations and attitudinal and emotional commitment62, 63 that are unwritten and inherently perceptual and subjective. As such, both parties in the ‘empowerer–empoweree’ relationship face risks. Managers place trust in individuals to act with discretion when making decisions and take risks that will not be injurious to the organisation.
Equally, individuals face comparable risks in accepting imbued empowerment because, as Mills and Ungson56 caveat, ‘he or she may fail.’
To conclude, Honold contends that employee empowerment goes far beyond managers delegating power to their direct reports. That, she claims, is a rather outdated, onedimensional perspective. She advocates viewing the construct through a multiplicity of lenses and suggests it therefore involves the ways in which leaders lead, how individuals react to their leadership and how peers interact with each other and their leaders. Ultimately, it involves the structuration of the organisation’s workrelated processes, culture and management philosophy that enable empowerment to become an organisational reality rather than managerial rhetoric. Holt et al.64 concur and conclude that turning rhetoric into reality involves cultural change and a holistic rationalisation of the organisation’s business operations, rather than a token gesture of managers relinquishing control and calling it ‘empowerment.’

1.Theorists suggest that employee empowerment is a regurgitation of previous employee involvement initiatives. With reference to theory and practice, to what extent do you agree?

2.Critically analyse the differences between empowerment and delegation.

3.It could be argued that parallels can be drawn between structural and psychological empowerment and the relational psychological contract.

How can organisations marry these concepts closer together, as part of implementing their employee empowerment initiatives?