HR assignment essay on: Empowerment in organization
Intend of this essay is to focus the role of empowerment in the organization. The essay has been continued in various segments to highlight both advantages and disadvantages of empowerment in the organization. First section of the essay has discussed the concept of empowerment and its role. Afterward, some more sections have recognized the importance of empowerment among employees in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. Further portion of the essay presents some researchers’ viewpoints supporting the impact of empowerment on the production level, job satisfaction and end results of the organization. On the other face of this essay, disadvantages and different perspective of empowerment has been presented. This section has included negative impact of empowerment on the organization such as adding cost of training, employee’s satisfaction and managers’ fear of delegating authority. Final section of the paper has concluded the entire essay and outlined the important highlighted part of it.
Empowerment is regarded with increasing the social, educational, spiritual, political or economic strength of group of people and individuals. When, empowerment is concerned in terms of organization level, there are different ways to empower the employees and communities established. In addition, if the process of empowerment is done rightly, it may result in high level of productivity and better work quality. Empowerment is made possible on the basis of organizational culture, nature and design of the work. In other words, empowerment can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization if supported properly. Moreover, it is usually based on job enlargement and job enrichment of the employees and groups of people in the organization. Job enlargement is to change the scope of a greater portion of an individual’s job in a horizontal way. On the other hand, job enrichment is to increase the job depth and responsibility of an individual including the higher level responsibilities of the organization (Brown & Harvery, 2006).
Furthermore, it is also understood that employee empowerment in the organization refers to giving up a few power and authority which are traditionally held by the management. It states that managers should also be ready to take on new jobs, knowledge, roles and responsibilities because managers create the base for lower level employees in the organization. Subsequently, empowerment should hold some requirements such as empowered leadership, empowered operations, empowered culture, knowledge management, work teams and production technology with regards to an organization. These all requirements provide the staff with better opportunities of making their involvement to decision-making system, delegating powers & tasks, and bearing the responsibilities. Empowerment makes an individual feel his/her importance in organizational framework, motivates them, makes them more innovative and creative in work and helps supporting the confidence between them and the organization (Heller, 2005).
Additionally, empowerment can also be viewed from crisis management point of view. Regardless of their type and nature, crisis may be in the form of intensification of events, scarcity of information, lack of rapid solutions, control hammering, and sometimes panic extension. But, these crises can be averted through the administrative input of empowerment as it can warn early about the expectation of crisis incidence. It also helps in effective planning for crisis management because it helps directing employees’ thinking towards incentive and allows them to be active properly in such difficult circumstances. Empowerment is also concerned one of the best practices in human resource management as it favors to the quality improvement and job satisfaction’s comprehension. In sum, if more attention is paid to the employees’ empowerment and involvement by the management of the organization, it may result in greater efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. It will presume the greater quality of strength of the employees and facilitate them to take steps as if that organization were their property (Cook & Hunsaker, 2001).
Moreover, there are a number of advantages of employee empowerment in an organization which make an impact on productivity, effectiveness, accomplishment of organizational objectives and finally decisions. Empowerment starts developing the level of education and training in the employees and therefore they start creating their own new and innovative ideas and participate in creating goals. On the other façade, empowerment increases the contribution of the employees, respect among all employees and productivity (Yukl, 2006). Similarly, it lowers the rate of absenteeism and conflicts with managers and administration of the organization. If employees are empowered properly, it may provide them with more satisfaction with their jobs. Empowerment not only increases the efficiency of work level, but also increases the depth of competency level and makes employees competent enough to compete with their competitive organizations. Therefore, it is required to set a balance between empowerment and traditional management (Vroom & Yetton, 1973).
Subsequently, researches have also presented various benefits of empowerment to the company, to an individual one by one. Taking about its benefits to the company, it increases the customer service, decision-making system and level of achievements at an organization level. It makes a chain of efficiency by improving the service quality and competitiveness of the employees. Therefore, developed work & service quality, higher productivity, and greater competitiveness improve the bottom line of a company by positively contributing to the organizations’ financial performance. It brings the larger commitment from the employees to the decisions made and improves decision-making framework. In addition, customer service is also improved through employee empowerment and employees of a company become able to provide quick response to the customers’ requirements and complaints. Employees are encouraged more to work better and thus they feel confident enough to work and interact with more enthusiasm (Gordon, 2005).
However, different companies follow different empowerment programs in order to increase and develop efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. They are keen of having energetic, enthusiastic and dedicated workers within their organization’s premises. Organizations approaching empowerment programs always expect having employees, who can grab the initiative, enjoy taking risks, volunteer their new upcoming ideas, solve problems skillfully, and always give their best to the company (Forrester, 2000). Therefore, they make it possible by encouraging empowerment programs for their workforce to make them competitive. In this relation, a few manufacturing companies of UK have been surveyed on the basis of their effectiveness due to employee empowerment. On the basis of research, it was found that 406 companies had running empowerment programs in their organization out of 564 companies. In addition, more than 45% of those UK companies reported significant performance gain in their places. Besides, more than 30% of the companies asserted reasonable gains, and more than 20% of them had accounted little performance gain or no improvement (Waterson, 1999).
As a result, it can be said that some of the organizations may have positive results through empowerment with its appropriate and right use and some may have neutral of least negative results basis on their capacity and adaption to the changes and empowerment. But there a number of drivers which drive employee empowerment, commitment and involvement making a contribution to the organization and foster the favorable climate for augmenting empowerment within the premises. These important factors are span of supervision, human resource policies, role clarity, challenging jobs, reward and recognition, top management’s attitude, supportive leadership, upward performance appraisals, access to other resources and information (Boudrias al, 2009).
It also affects the employees individually in terms of their psychological and emotional attachment to their work groups, peers and jobs. It has been researched that committed and empowered employees are likely to perform better productive and high quality work and in sum they are willing to give their extra time to solve and handle difficult problems. Empowerment makes the employees more loyal, innovative, productive and resourceful (Avolio, Zhu & Bhatia, 2004). In a similar way, many empowerment theorists have considered that psychological empowerment is significantly related to job performance and job satisfaction of an individual which automatically affect the efficiency of an organization. It was also noticed and made a point that climate of empowerment can take an organization to its higher level of success if done properly and timely (Liden, Wayne & Sparrowe, 2000).
Alternatively, there is another phase of empowerment for its failure in many organizations. There may be a range of possible reasons for the lack of proper empowerment in organizations and therefore present comparatively low level of efficiency and success. It is very much known fact that empowerment embodies change. In this relation to change, sometimes top management is not comfortable with the nature and type of change. Managers usually have the command, control and power to do whatever they have good knowledge and information about. On the other hand, empowerment needs that managers would have to give up some of their level of authority and control from the employees. In this case, managers can be afraid of losing their power and delegating responsibility and control to others. They pretend that employees may make poor decisions and mistakes in their work. Therefore, managers may need full support of organization and training in giving power to leadership behaviors (Pastor, 1996).
Second phase of empowerment demonstrate that empowerment takes time. It takes long time in conversion from an authority and control culture to empowerment of employees. Empowerment is seen as a long-term program which includes employees’ participation, involvement and commitment. Next, employees may oppose empowerment in an organization because they are conditioned over the years to follow the management’s orders and not collaborate with it. Thus, when employees are supposed to provide greater responsibility they may feel insecure and stimulate fear about it and resist empowerment in that case. Some of the surveys has presented that most of the employees have maintained their work and job life routine and are satisfied with it (Seibert, Silver & Randolph, 2004).
Apart from this, it is not necessary that empowerments have only positive impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization. Employees can use given powers in a wrong way and abuse the powers given to them. On the other hand, empowerment may be too much responsibility for some employees and difficult to deal with. Moreover, the employees who mainly focus on their own success and goal accomplishments rather than group or team’s may leave the organization. On the other front of empowerment, some leading organizations already do well neglect it from cost and time’s perspective. Other perspectives of empowerment may bring about the situation of misunderstanding between workforce and managers. Managers may have difficulty in accepting the new culture of employee empowerment in work place. These may give birth to conflicts, therefore managers and employees would not be in a condition to give productive results (Ongori, 2009).
Afterward, empowerment also include training programs in which employees are taught leaderships skills, group dynamics and boldness and these programs involve additional training cost. Although, these training programs are proved beneficial for the organization’s effectiveness, additional cost and time have to be sustained by the organization itself. In addition, it cannot be made sure that each empowerment training program will yield only positive results. Besides it, one of the disadvantages of empowerment is when it affects the organization negatively. Employees not having adequate knowledge required for various decision makings in business can weaken the success of company and cause interrelation disagreements (Meyer, Becker & Vandenberghe, 2004).
On the basis of conclusion, it can be illustrated that empowerment is to increase the power, authority and capacity of individuals and groups to covert those into desired outcomes. Employees are given the responsibilities and authority to make the decisions regarding all aspects of an organizations’ business. In this regard, this essay has classified its advantages and disadvantages with the support of multiple researches. Employee empowerment may lead to greater job satisfaction, increases productivity, motivation among the employees and hence reduces the cost for the organization. On the similar front, empowerment has potential to make the employees competent, creative, innovative and good decision makers. Increased ownership of the employees through empowerment automatically increases the efficiency of a firm. Empowered employees need less delegation and supervision. One of the examples presented from manufacturing firms of UK demonstrated that more than 40% of the firms have reported greater performance gain and substantial outcomes.
Paper also discussed about the impact of empowerment because employees start creating goals, taking risks and find ways to get the success. On the other front of empowerment, it brings about the feeling of insecurity and fear in the employee after being given the responsibilities they are not prepared for. Sometimes managers also do not like empowerment as they afraid of delegating their power to the employees. Moreover, employees may abuse their power and control as they are not aware of it properly. Therefore, it is needed to provide due attention to many aspects with respect to employee empowerment such as responsibilities and powers for vital activities, realigning of management system in accordance with empowerment principles and clearly defining organizational empowerment objectives.
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