EIO

5,4 A review of the literature on

employee empowerment
Linda Honold
202 President of Empowerment Systems and is based at Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, USA
“Employee empowerment” as a term is frequently used in management circles.
In practice, however, it is a daunting effort to find an exact definition of it. There
are hundreds of articles on the topic. Some attempt their own definition; others
expect that the reader already knows what the concept means. What is
employee empowerment? What are its roots? What do the various theoretical
voices have to say about the concept? An exploration of these questions is the
content of this article.

Roots of the concept of employee empowerment

Empowerment in Organizations,
Vol. 5 No. 4, 1997, pp. 202-212.
© MCB University Press, 0968-4891
The multiple dimensions of employee empowerment make it a difficult concept
to define. Additionally, writers on the concept use different words to describe
similar approaches. Sullivan (1994) indicates that prior to 1990 empowerment
could only be accessed through articles that discussed topics such as
participative management, total quality control, individual development,
quality circles, and strategic planning.
Since 1990 the number of articles with “employee empowerment” as the key
descriptor has exploded. This is partly because the term can be used to describe
both the individual aspect of the concept as well as the organizational one. A
complicating factor in defining employee empowerment is that by its very
nature, in order for empowerment to be successful, each organization must
create and define it for itself. Empowerment must address the needs and culture
of each unique entity. Without this self-reference, employee empowerment
invariably fails because the commitment, or the sense of ownership of the
concept, is not created.
Various researchers have looked at the dimensions of empowerment through
different lenses. Control of one’s own work, autonomy on the job, variations of
teamwork, and pay systems that link pay with performance are all called
empowerment. As this variety is examined, it becomes clear that some of them
focus on an individual’s ability and desire to be empowered. Menon (1995) terms
this the “empowered state”. Alternatively, some of the items addressed, for
instance: teams, job enrichment, pay for performance, employee stock
ownership, are clearly not merely from the individual perspective. They are
techniques that management uses to create an environment that allows for, and
even facilitates, employees opting for an empowered state. Individuals must
choose to take self-power or not. Leaders create an environment where
individuals are able to make that choice.
 The beginnings of the concept of employee empowerment can be found in Literature on
several places. The socio-technical approach (Lewin, 1951) combined two employee
aspects of work in a systemic manner. The idea of job enrichment (Herzberg, empowerment
Mausner et al., 1959; Herzberg, 1968) work was focused on increasing control
and decision-making in one’s work. The literature on job autonomy, (Herzberg,
Mausner et al., 1959; Herzberg, 1968; Hackman and Oldham, 1976; Hackman
and Oldham, 1980; Menon, 1995) addresses another component of what is today 203
referred to employee empowerment.
The approach to leadership that empowers subordinates as a primary
component of managerial and organizational effectiveness is also called
employee empowerment (Bennis, 1989; Block, 1987; Kanter, 1977; Kanter, 1979;
Kanter, 1989; McClelland, 1975). Another dimension has its beginnings in the
analysis of internal organization power and control (Kanter, 1979;
Tannenbaum, 1968) which showed that the sharing of power and control
increases organizational effectiveness. Others identify the team dimension of
empowerment (Beckhard, 1969; Neilsen, 1986). Research on alienation (Seeman,
1959) and discussion of employee participation (Lawler, 1992) are also
precursors of the idea of employee empowerment[1].
Having developed an understanding of the roots of employee empowerment,
the next challenge is to determine what it is that people mean when they refer
to it. The literature on employee empowerment can be divided into five
groupings: leadership, the individual empowered state, collaborative work,
structural or procedural change, and the multi-dimensional perspective which
encompasses most of the four previously stated categories.

Leader’s role in creating an empowering context

The earliest perspective on employee empowerment is derived from the
dictionary definition of bestowing power upon others but it changes over time
to focus on how the leader alters the context of the workplace to allow
employees to take power. Kanter (1977) defines empowerment as giving power
to people who are at a disadvantaged spot in the organization. She sees a
continuum of power from powerlessness to empowered. Continuing in this
tradition (Block 1987), Sullivan (1994) and Sullivan and Howell (1996) also focus
on the role of the manager in empowering employees.
This perspective suggests that an empowered organization is one where
managers supervise more people than in a traditional hierarchy and delegate
more decisions to their subordinates (Malone, 1997). Managers act like coaches
and help employees solve problems. Employees, he concludes, have increased
responsibility. Superiors empowering subordinates by delegating
responsibilities to them leads to subordinates who are more satisfied with their
leaders and consider them to be fair and in turn to perform up to the superior’s
expectations (Keller and Dansereau, 1995).
In practice, the definition of delegation appears to be of critical importance.
It can be discerned by the language used by the researcher. The words
“subordinate” and “superior” in the language suggests giving additional tasks
EIO to employees. This is not perceived as empowering by employees (Menon 1995).
5,4 Providing for the development of self-worth by negotiating for latitude in
decision making and changing aspects of the employee’s job leads to increased
levels of perceived self-control and hence empowerment (Vogt and Murrell 1990;
Keller and Dansereau 1995; Menon 1995).
Interventions provided by leaders to achieve empowerment deal with
204 systemic, structural, and programmatic issues as well as individual and
managerial responsibilities. Examples include creating a shared vision;
providing clear top-management support; the use of team and temporary group
models of organization; responding to external circumstances and developing a
strategy for continually scanning the environment; redesigning work to reflect
collaborative norms; the use of job-enrichment; creative use of sponsorships,
role models, peer alliances, coaching, and mentoring; the development of reward
systems that build “win-win” rather than “win-lose” attitudes; and
identification and clarification of common goals (Vogt and Murrell 1990).
Simply providing opportunities for employees to take power is not enough.
Employees must also chose to be engaged in those options.

The individual perspective of the empowered state

If power is not taken by those it is bestowed upon, there is no empowerment.
Murrell (Vogt and Murrell, 1990) defines empowerment as an act of building,
developing and increasing power by working with others, which he terms
“interactive empowerment”, and of having the ability to influence one’s own
behavior, which he calls “self empowerment”. Another definition of employee
empowerment from this perspective is “a cognitive state [of] perceived control,
perceived competence and goal internalization” (Menon, 1995, p. 30).
Some who operate from the individual perspective equate empowerment
with a process. For them empowerment refers to “the process of gaining
influence over events and outcomes of importance to an individual or group”
(Foster-Fishman and Keys, 1995). Thomas and Velthouse (1985) believe that
empowerment relates to the very basis of human existence. They conceive
empowerment as occurring as “cognitive variables” change. The key cognitive
variables are the environment, the tasks, the behavior of the leader, the
individual’s interpretive styles, and the impact and meaningfulness of the task.
Building on their work and that of Conger and Kanungo (1988) who set out
initial constructs of empowerment from the employee’s perspective, Menon
(1995) surveyed 311 employees of a corporation to determine the effects of
empowerment on them. The survey found that:
• Perceived uncertainty of the job, formalization, centralization, poor
communications, non-contingent/arbitrary reward systems, role
ambiguity, and role conflict in the work environment lead to decreased
perceptions of control and lower empowerment.
• Greater job autonomy and meaningfulness of the job lead to greater
perceived control and greater empowerment.
 • Consulting, recognizing, inspiring, and mentoring behaviors of the Literature on
immediate supervisor lead to greater perceived control and greater employee
empowerment and can even moderate the effect of poor contextual empowerment
factors of empowerment.
• The greater the empowerment, the higher the internal work motivation,
the higher the job satisfaction, the lower the job stress, the greater the job 205
involvement, the more involvement beyond the defined job of the
individual, and the greater the organizational commitment.
In a similar study surveying 393 middle managers of Fortune 500 corporations,
Spreitzer (1996) found that employees who are empowered have low ambiguity
about their role in organizations. The leaders in empowered organizations have
a wide span of control which leads to more autonomy for the employee.
Empowered employees feel that their organization provides them sociopolitical
support, that they have greater access to information and resources than in
traditional organizations, and that their work climate is participatory. Spreitzer
found that access to resources, while good to have, was not significantly related
to a perception of being empowered.

Collaborative work as empowerment

“Employees often think of empowerment in terms of self-empowerment. They
lose sight of the fact that teamwork and cooperation depend on each element in
the system working in concert with every other element.” (Landes, 1994, p. 116).
The team concept of empowerment probably developed out of the quality circle
efforts of the 1970s and 1980s (Sims, 1986). Empowerment from this perspective
is “an act of building, developing, and increasing power through cooperating,
sharing, and working together” (Rothstein, 1995, p. 21). In other words
empowerment means managing organizations by collaboration where workers
have a voice (Gorden, 1995).

Structural or procedural change as empowerment

This group of writers see the need for changing the processes of work within an
organization as critical to achieving employee empowerment. Some suggest
this approach emanates from the work of G. Edwards Deming and his work on
quality. It is often specifically equated to total quality management (TQM)
(Gilbert, 1993; Westphal, Gulati, et al. 1997). Some liken empowerment to other
specific programs such as employee stock ownership programs (ESOPs) as well
(Tseo and Ramos, 1995).
In his study of 75 employees at a power plant, (Ward, 1993) determined that
employee empowerment has three critical elements:
(1) clarity and consistency of the organization’s over-all production and
development goals, and an alignment of all systems and management
and employee levels toward those goals,
EIO (2) ongoing evaluation and development of the professional needs of the
5,4 employees with preparation for a greater sense of process ownership and
accountability,
(3) assurance of congruence between corporate goals, management goals,
and the goals of the organization’s employees (p. 4).
206 TQM and ESOPs are viewed as ways to achieve these objectives.
Malone (1997) suggests that technological improvements in communications
are the key to employee empowerment. When the costs of communicating
across a distance were high or virtually unavailable decentralized decision-
making was critical to getting anything done. However as communication costs
fell it was easier to bring remote information together and centralized decision
makers were able to gain a broader perspective and therefore make better
decisions. Malone posits that as these costs have continued to fall and
independent agents can be connected through relatively inexpensive
communications channels, decision making should once again be decentralized
allowing for more resolutions to be made at a local level.

Multi-dimensional perspectives on empowerment

Much of the most current writing on employee empowerment suggests that
one-dimensional approaches are not enough. For empowerment to be effective it
must be multi-dimensional. Vogt and Murrell (1990) identify six dimensions to
empowerment: educating, leading, mentoring/supporting, providing,
structuring, and one that incorporates all of the above. Empowerment in their
perspective may be initiated by oneself or by others.
In an empowered organization, employees are able to fully participate as
partners, they take initiative, work on teams as well as individually, and have
the authority to make strategic decisions (Garfield, 1993). Management’s job
from this perspective is to create a culture of participation by providing a
compelling mission, a structure that emphasizes flexibility and autonomy,
rewards for participation and a lack of punishment for risk taking, as well as
ongoing involvement programs and support for the integration of employees’
work and family lives.
A study (Martin, 1994) researching conditions that facilitate or impede
employee empowerment, suggested that personal empowerment demanded self
confidence and a strong work ethic. From a corporate perspective it was
important that there be a non-regimented task design and job-specific training.
Managers must provide positive feedback, information, resources, supportive
policies, and a stress-minimized working environment.
Macy, Thompson, and Farais (1995) identify the major components of high
performing organizations to be very similar to those found in the literature on
empowering organizations. They include activities such as multi-skilling, cross
training, self-directed work teams, and horizontal design; human resource
systems such as learning and development, job enrichment/enlargement, peer
review, and innovative compensation plans; and total quality management that Literature on
involves line employees such as statistical process control techniques, just-in- employee
time inventory and delivery, and formalized supplier/vendor partnerships. In empowerment
addition to the empowering aspects, they identify the use of technology as a key
component of high performance.
Mallak and Kurstedt (1996) write of empowerment as having expanded upon
the concept of participative management. Their model of empowerment 207
includes four concepts:
(1) intrinsically motivated behavior leading to
(2) internal justification for actions taken whereby
(3) management releases some of its authority and responsibility to other
levels in the organization that deal directly with the product or
(4) service integrating coworkers for problem solving.
They believe that empowerment should be integrated into an organization’s
culture in a progressive manner. That is, initially one follows another’s lead,
then that person models his/her behavior after that of the leader, next he/she
begins to develop an understanding of empowerment themselves and act
accordingly, and finally the individual becomes a leader and model for others.
Management’s role in empowerment then, is to understand that this is a gradual
process and to assist individuals as they move through the four developmental
phases.
Blanchard, Carlos & Randolf (1996) define empowerment as having the
freedom to act but also the responsibility for results. They believe this freedom
can be achieved by leadership sharing information with everyone, creating
autonomy through delineating boundaries, and replacing hierarchies with self-
managed teams.
McLagan and Nel (1997) also provide a multi-dimensional perspective on
employee empowerment. For them it consists of the establishment of a system
of corporate values; a flowing structure as opposed to a hierarchy with boxes;
facilitating leadership; each person becoming a manager of his/her own job;
open and honest communication; relationships of partnering for performance;
employees who understand business and industry as well as finance and
economics, who possess critical thinking skills, who are flexible in their
learning and decision making, and who are competent in their jobs; controls
based on checks and balances and feedback on performance; and a pay system
that rewards everyone when the organization performs well.
Using the employee empowerment process at Colgate-Palmolive as a model,
Caudron (1995) suggests that key components include: self-directed work
teams; free flow of information about company goals and directions; training
and continual development of work, management, and leadership skills by all
employees; managers who are more like coaches and who empower gradually;
employee control of needed resources, provision for performance measurement;
continual positive feedback and reinforcement on performance.
EIO Not everyone agrees that employee empowerment is an appropriate
5,4 approach to managing an organization. It is perceived by some to be a new form
of manipulation of employees by management. The next section will examine
these concerns.

Critiques of employee empowerment

208 The literature critiquing the concept of employee empowerment appears in
varying stages of sophistication. Citing the absence of literature describing
empowerment in any large corporation, Koch and Godden (1997) proclaim that
employee empowerment is unworkable. It is their contention that empowerment
is incompatible with strong leadership and is an inefficient way to control an
organization. Citing the fact that Ben of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, a company
touted for its empowering practices, is retiring, they concluded that
empowerment “appears to be an attractive and sometimes successful approach,
but one for medium-sized ambitions” (p. 12). Despite their argument, in my
review of companies that considered themselves empowered, I found many that
had several thousand employees and who appear to be doing well in the
marketplace. They include Herman Mueller, Southwest Airlines, Polaroid,
Boeing, Avis, Visa, and United Airlines.
In a case study entitled “The empowerment effort that came undone”
Rothstein (1995) describes a situation where the president of a company
empowered a team to deal with declining sales. The effort fell apart when upon
presenting their recommendations to the company’s management team, the
solutions were criticized as being unworkable. The article concluded with five
experts critiquing the case. Their commentary suggested that the effort failed
not because empowerment was unworkable but because management did not
implement well. The company president did not support the team. He did not
facilitate a conversation to assist the team and the critical managers in
resolving their differences. The employees did not have the authority to make
anything happen; boundaries were not clearly delineated. Too much was
expected too fast without ensuring that everyone in the company knew what
empowerment was about.
Building on a similar theme, Foster-Fishman (1995) found that unless the
culture of an organization is appropriate, employee empowerment efforts are
doomed to failure. Management must be willing to allow for increased staff
control of the work, to allow them to have greater access to resources, and to
have more discretionary choice in the way they do their work. There must be an
environment of trust and inclusion as well as a tolerance of risk-taking. They
suggest that employee empowerment is not for every organization. It should be
undertaken only when it fits an internal or external need and when the people
and the systems are willing to make changes. This willingness can be
determined by looking at the issues of control and power, trust and inclusion,
and risk-taking currently exemplified in the organization.
 Babson (1995a) identifies an underlying concern Babson identifies is that if Literature on
employee empowerment is successful, unions become virtually superfluous as employee
their role of mediating between employees and management is no longer empowerment
needed. He sums up his anxieties about employee empowerment by citing the
preamble to the constitution of the United Automobile Workers. It states:
“Working men and women...are often in the best position to participate in
making intelligent, informed decisions, at the same time, we oppose efforts by 209
companies to use democratic sounding programs as a smokescreen designed to
undermine collective bargaining and workers’ rights.” (1995b, p. 2). Added to
this opposition is the concern about plant closings that come at the same time
as announcements of participative/empowering programs. In his view, in some
instances employee empowerment is nothing more than a new form of
exploitation, taxing people’s minds as well as their hands while providing them
with no real control of the work. These employers seem to define empowerment
as having production employees taking on responsibility previously performed
by the supervisor or by a skilled tradesperson. Babson views this as incomplete
as there is no authority or capacity to mobilize resources to get anything done.
In order for employee empowerment to be real, “rather than a gift bestowed,
power devolves to those who have the capacity to take hold of it” (p. 5).
Parker and Slaughter (1995) equate employee empowerment to a
management-by-stress approach that pushes people and systems to the
breaking point by increasingly forcing workers to do more with less. Adler
(1995) sees empowerment as working, but only to a point. In one company he
examined, workers get control over doing things like stopping the production
line over quality issues and cross-training, yet the work that they do is
standardized and controlled by the management of the plant. Babson (1995c)
found a similar occurrence at a car factory. Responsibilities that were
transferred to employees were things like the ability to hand out paychecks on
payday. They were more symbolic than substantive. It is interesting that the
companies that both Adler and Babson examined were Japanese owned
corporations operating in the United States. This may indicate that the
Japanese form of empowerment is different than that found in American
counterparts.
The critiques of employee empowerment emanate from what appears to be
half-hearted attempts by employers that allow for a very limited degree of
decision making and control by employees.

Conclusion: constructs of employee empowerment

The practice of employee empowerment appears to be ahead of the scholarly
research on the topic. Of the over 200 articles on employee empowerment I
located in a literature search, only four were in scholarly, refereed journals
(Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Keller and Dansereau, 1995; Spreitzer, 1996;
Thomas and Velthouse, 1985). Most were in professional or trade journals, with
a few appearing in popular business magazines. However, interest in
EIO researching the concept appears to be growing in strength as at least ten
5,4 dissertations have been written on the topic in the past two years.
Also it appears as though employee empowerment is on the rise in
organizations. As well, it looks as though it is an evolutionary process that
cannot be achieved in the short term. Initially, there will be mistakes as both
employees and management internalize what it means to be empowered.
210 Finally, it seems that employee empowerment is multi-dimensional. No single
set of contingencies can describe it.
Employee empowerment will not happen naturally in organizations. Too
many disempowering structures have been built into them over the years.
Changing leadership alone will not engender an empowered organization nor
will individuals learning about empowerment and taking responsibility for
what they can in their given environment. Both the leadership component and
the individual component will have an impact but they will not be as as
successful as they could be. According to the literature, only when a multi-
dimensional approach is taken will the organization become empowering. The
multi-dimensional constructs that appear repeatedly in the literature are:
• Leadership focused on the development of the individuals throughout
the organization, creating a vision and developing common goals, and
continually scanning the environment and adapting to it;
• Teams and collaborative working arrangements;
• Personal responsibility for performance exemplified in job autonomy,
control over decisions directly relating to one’s work, job enrichment
through multi-skilling and cross training, access to information to
measure one’s own performance and make good decisions, and
allowance of risk taking;
• Structure that is decentralized, has controls based on checks and
balances, and is flexible allowing for development over time;
• Contingent reward system with such components as employee stock
option programs, pay for performance, and win-win strategies.
In summary, writers on empowerment view it from several perspectives. The
one-dimensional approach is that managers delegate power to subordinates.
Research suggests that employee empowerment is multi-dimensional. It
involves how leaders lead, how individuals react, how peers interact, and how
work related processes are structured.

Note
1. Other perspectives on empowerment outside the employee/ employer relationship that will
not be a part of this study come from throughout the field of sociology. Examples include
the civil rights movement and black voter registration drives in the south (Solomon 1976),
community development (Solomon 1976), union drives (Hoffman 1978), citizenship (Berger
and Neuhaus 1977), and health care (Stensrud and Stensrud 1982).
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