Leadership And Empowerment
The growing interest in empowerment is justified by the need to develop effective organizational strategies, which boost trust and confidence in employees and as a result, improve productivity and performance at workplace. Empowerment is fairly regarded as an effective means to give employees sufficient freedom of decision-making and praising their achievements and successes. That effective leaders use empowerment is clear, but unfortunately, the concept of empowerment is still surrounded by a set of misconceptions. Empowerment requires that employees possess resources and skills necessary to exercise freedom for the sake of achieving their organizational objectives; without these, the concept of empowerment loses its relevance and ceases to be a reliable source of confidence and competence at workplace.
Generally, employee empowerment implies the process of “delegating decision-making authority down hierarchical levels in an organization” (Hughes & Ginnet 27), but where leaders view empowerment as limited to the process of delegating decision-making powers to employees, in reality empowerment implies the need to supply employees with the resources necessary to exercise the benefits of empowerment to the fullest. For empowerment to produce positive effects on the quality of employee performance and productivity, employees must possess skills, resources, and knowledge (Hughes & Ginnet 33). Otherwise, empowerment results in nothing but confusion and stress (Hughes & Ginnet 34).
Leaders often view empowerment as something that does not require changing their leadership style and something that is the end in itself and not the means of achieving other organizational goals. The reality, however, is quite different. It should be noted that implementing and using the benefits of empowerment in organizations is impossible without reconsidering the principles of control which leaders utilize in their daily interactions with followers. “This kind of error is typified in a consultant’s article on empowerment in which he defined a manager’s function as getting ‘your people to do what you want’” (Kinlaw 19). In the context of power distribution in organizations, leaders are not always able to step away from traditional focus of control. Moreover, they view empowerment as the ends, while empowerment is only a means of improving the mental capacity of an organization by utilizing the hidden mental and decision-making potential of employees. In the situation, where leaders introduce the new system of empowerment without changing the focus of control, employees will be more likely to experience serious power limitations, while individualism and self-centered approaches to organizational performance will dominate (Kinlaw 20). At the same time, where empowerment is viewed as the ends and not as the means of achieving specific organizational objectives, leaders will fail to position empowerment as the source of continuous improvement.
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