Advantages Of Empowerment

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In today 's rapid changing corporate world, where reliability to organizations is fading fast, empowerment has been growing by companies to retain employees. Factors such as downsizing, introduction of self-managed teams, higher employee skills and introduction of total quality management (TQM) programs also contributed to the trend for managers to welcome empowerment.

Empowerment is defined as "the freedom and the ability of employees to make decisions and commitments." (Robbins, 2003, p265). In other words, it means giving employees the authority, opportunity, and motivation to take initiative to solve organizational problems.

There are several reasons why managers should give up centralized control to support empowerment. First, it serves …show more content…

Employees from empowered organizations are more involved in their job and have more desire in improving their knowledge and skills. As these employees are more eagerly to share their skills with one another, the skill level of the organization rises too, resulting jobs to be done in a more capable way. Also it increases employee motivation, commitment and creativity.

However, empowerment does have its potential downsides. Power, expectations and trust are probably the most important potential downsides. When organizations become more empowered, managers often feel that their positions are being undermined as their subordinates are making decisions that they used to make, resulting them to believe a loss of power. Also, there are managers who are reluctant to open to their employees, which may result in the loss of trust among the work group. In situations where staff morale is low, embarking on an employee empowerment program could also be potentially disastrous.

Nevertheless, empowerment represents a huge step away from traditional management-employees relations. It means the elimination of management 's control on employees ' …show more content…

In order to allow employees to act more freely to accomplish their jobs, management should ensure that information about company 's performance is distributed to employees. Management should also provide training to employees to equip them with knowledge and skills they need to contribute to company goals. Employees should be given justifiable power to make informed decisions without clearing everything first with someone higher. Managers should not discipline employees for not making a sound decision. Instead, managers should explain to the employee on what went wrong and encourage him or her. Employees should be rewarded based on company performance. The rewards may be in the form of profit sharing, employee stock ownership plans, or rising of

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