Employee Empowerment

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 as a strategic way to develop products and services more efficiently. Secondly, it is because other firms in the world are also doing so. Lastly, firms hope to create a unique organization with advanced performance capabilities. Empowerment in Poland seems to work. Satisfaction with co-workers was higher when employees are empowered in Poland.

Another advantage of empowerment is staff flexibility. 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' work.

In traditional command and control structure, the upper management of the organization normally has more authority than lower-level employees. Managers of these traditional organizations usually have to tell the employees what needs to be done and the allocation of tasks. They will have to monitor the work progress of the employees and will step in to solve any problem that arises.