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.

Many managers have the false impression that they have to give away power to the employees if empowerment is introduced in the organization. Consider this; in an empowered organization where employees work in groups, they are often delegated to make decisions to solve minor problems in their work. There is no requirement for managers to supervise, allocate tasks, or solve the problems for the work groups. This in fact frees the managers to allow them to have power to discover new opportunities for the organization. Even with sharing power with employees, managers will still maintain the overall responsibility to set goals, create conditions favorable to the achievement of goals, and monitoring the outcomes.

Empowerment takes the forms of 4 basic elements; information, knowledge, power and rewards. 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 salary.

Managers have to take care of almost everything in the organization. They must plan for future and set the overall objectives of the organization, set goals and targets for every activity, set out how each task must be done in detail, provide all resources necessary for operation, provide training for employees, allocate tasks to employees, and monitor the progress and results of the tasks. The managers will have to step in to solve any problem