This activity is important because as a manager, you will want to understand psychological empowerment in order to motivate your employees. Employees find tasks psychologically empowering if they have certain qualities meaningfulness, impact, competence, and self-determination. If jobs can be structured to have these qualities, employees can perform better and be more committed.

The goal of this activity is for you to demonstrate your knowledge of task attributes that lead to psychological empowerment. You will choose a type of psychological empowerment that matches job descriptions.

Match a type of psychological empowerment to each of the following job descriptions.

1. High Meaningfulness
2. High Self-Determination
3. High Competence
4. High Impact
5. Low Competence
6. Low Impact
7. Low Self-Determination
8. Low Meaningfulness

Match each of the options above to the items below.

• For the last five years, John has worked in retail for a local outdoor sporting goods store.

• Lisa has always wanted to work for a non-profit organization, feeling most passionate about childrens issues.

• John spends most of his time at work helping customers. When traffic is low, he spends his time of whatever specific task his floor manager has assigned for the day.

• Lisas new job description includes a variety of tasks and she is granted the freedom to decide which to focus on and any particular point in time.

• As a new graduate, Lisa is a bit afraid that she is too inexperienced to successfully fulfill all of her assigned job duties.

• Regardless of the specific task at hand, John is very familiar with his job duties and outdoor sports in general, so he feels confident that he can be successful at work.

• John only wishes that he could be more involved in training customers so he could impart his love and knowledge for outdoor sports on his customers.

• Lisa is excited because she believes she can really help her company make a difference in this job.