Employee empowerment is the concept widely used in present day management. Employee empowerment is usually referred to as “enhanced involvement of employees in organizational processes and decision-making” (Conger & Kanungo, 1998). Despite the growing popularity of employee empowerment as such, the utility of the concept is not widely recognized; moreover, the majority of modern businesses and organizations still adhere to the more traditional (and often, outdated) employee management approaches.
The reasons of this organizational reluctance vary, but I believe that distrust toward employees is the central element hindering the development and implementation of employee empowerment approaches at workplace.
Empowerment and participation initiatives: why not? Empowerment is “the process of enabling and authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision making in autonomous way” (Conger & Kanungo, 1998).
Despite the fact that employee empowerment almost always implies employee autonomy and freedom of decision-making, empowerment does not mean that employees are completely free in taking organizational decisions.
On the contrary, employee empowerment is a reasonable combination of the organizational control and the autonomy of decision-making: while employees perceive sufficient amount of freedom, they remain under the peer control of the upper management.
The concept of employee empowerment and various participation initiatives seem an ideal approach to management; unfortunately, employers are not willing to change the traditional vision of employee management and to recognize that the time has come, when a new type of employee-employer relationships needs to be developed. The problem is that employees tend to hold fears in regard to the notion of empowerment as such.
Many employees are still unclear as for the essence and the meaning of empowerment; many of them lack proper understanding of what training and feedback is.
Some employers find themselves unable to form and maintain stable strategic framework that could serve the basis for the development and implementation of various participation initiatives. All these fears produce negative attitudes toward empowerment in general, and toward empowering specific employees in particular. What seems to be true is that fears have already turned into a serious obstacle on employers’ way to the development of balanced participation strategies; moreover, employers lack appropriate knowledge as for the ways these fears can be overcome.
That however, does not mean that employers are completely unaware of the benefits, which different participation initiatives offer. Training, the development and promotion of workforce, the development and implementation of codes of conduct and strategic operational documents, career day participation, workplace competitions, presentations and teamwork are just some out of many popular participation techniques so widely applied at workplace.
Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these initiatives is significantly decreased by the evident distrust, which employers tend to perceive toward employee decision-making roles in organizations toward decision-making roles of employees. Empowerment, participation, and distrust: balancing the imbalanced Conger & Kanungo (1998) suggest that “distrust of employees can reflect an employer perspective that identifies the purpose of empowerment not as mutual benefit for the employee and employer but rather as a self-interested strategy for securing greater buy-in, engagement and commitment”.
In other words, distrust turns mutually beneficial participation initiative into the means of generating better employee loyalty and commitment to strategic organizational tasks without giving anything in return. From my experience, and on the basis of everything previously learned about employee empowerment and participation, distrust stands behind all factors and elements that slow down the development and implementation of empowerment strategies at workplace.
Unable to overcome distrust, employers still pursue empowerment as the key to better workplace productivity, but instead of offering employees more decision-making freedom, such employers burden their workers with unnecessary and always unreasonable tasks. Very often, distrust causes a different effect, when employees are gradually deprived of the roles and powers with which they had been previously assigned.
Empowerment, participation, and distrust may initially seem incompatible, but in reality, employers possess a vast array of management instruments that may help them decrease their distrust and combine their managerial vision and management techniques in the ways that enhance employee empowerment and participation. I am confident that employers cannot completely eliminate distrust; moreover, distrust is appropriate and acceptable as the basis for monitoring the quality of employee performance.
Employee empowerment and participation require combining distrust with front-line worker autonomy. Employees should be offered sufficient (but again, reasonable) control over organizational resources. Employees must maintain their commitment to supervisors and adhere to the strategic goals and objectives. I think that empowerment is not valuable in itself; rather, it is valuable to the extent where it provides employees with decision-making freedom and creates flexible workplace environment.
Regardless whether employees enjoy workplace competitions, or whether they are actively involved into developing presentations and working in teams, the effectiveness of these strategies will be zeroed unless employers, managers, and supervisors are able to minimize the feeling of distrust they have toward those at the lower levels of organizational structure – those who are actually the source and the foundation of the company’s success in the market.
Despite the fact that the importance of employee empowerment and participation initiatives in organizational management is widely recognized, only a small portion of present day organizations actively utilize the benefits of employee empowerment at workplace.
I believe that distrust prevents employers from managing their employees more effectively, and unless they are able to minimize the feeling of distrust toward their employees, neither presentations, nor competitions or other participation initiatives will improve the quality of employee-employer collaboration at workplace.
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