How can empowerment enhance individual performance?

“Empowerment is an effective approach for improving employee attitudes and work behaviors in a broad range of industries, occupations and geographic regions,” said lead researcher Scott Seibert, professor of management and organizations in University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business.

According to Seibert, the study results indicate that properly implemented empowerment initiatives can lead to higher job satisfaction, lower turnover and reduced stress among workers. Empowered employees also are more innovative and perform better at their jobs.

Seibert and coauthors examined more than 140 previous studies on psychological empowerment in the workplace published since 1995 that involved thousands of workers. They found that the studies sometimes tend to exaggerate the value – or lack thereof – of empowerment. Some claim it will revitalize an organization with “lightning-like” speed, while others dismissed it as a “chimera” and point to high failure rates at organizations that tried it.

Even so, Seibert said the previous studies identify certain organizational characteristics and leader behaviors, as well as employee traits, that can to lead to successful empowerment initiatives.

An effective empowerment initiative should have include:

· High performance practices: Managers share information, decentralize authority, involve workers in decision-making, provide training opportunities and pay well. Seibert said high performance management makes workers feel a strong part of their organization and that they matter to the company’s success. · Socio-political support: Managers make their employees feel like a valued part of the organization and encourage employees to recognize each other’s importance. · Leadership: A manager who inspires, provides strong feedback and is a good role model enhances workers’ feelings of competence and helps employees find meaning in their work. · Work design characteristics: Managers encourage training and provide individual workers with challenging work assignments.

“Managers in these studies reported that empowered workers were more innovative and more willing to take the initiative to solve problems on their own,” Seibert said. “Employees said they were more engaged in their work when empowered, that they felt like they had an influence and an impact on the business around them.”

These work improvements apply to improved team performance as well as individual performance, and that they tended to be strongest in the service sector, Seibert added.

The study also revealed the following information about work force empowerment:

· Men and women generally have similar reactions to empowerment. · While empowerment has an impact across national borders and different cultures, its impact seems to be greater in Asia than in North America, perhaps because empowerment is more effective in collectivist cultures or that work arrangements in Asian businesses are more conducive to empowerment initiatives. · Employees who have positive self-evaluation characteristics are more likely to feel empowered, and people who feel more empowered to begin with will react more strongly to empowerment initiatives.

Through empowerment individuality becomes more respected and thus giving the person more working space and more freedom of action and that leads to better performance because each person feels responsible for his own actions.

Empowerment is about authority, more responsibilities and confidence... When you empower an employee you put him/her in a accountable situation.. In a challenged situation , like you are saying "prove yourself" !

Thank  You

Empowering an individual gives them a greater level of confidence relating to responsibilities and trust thus enable them to do more and be efficient in providing the best outcome. 

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Agree with the expert answers here

Motivated employees are the most important factor in the long-term success of any business. Empowerment positively impacts motivation, and motivation leads to better performance. Theses links are much more important for small businesses, where employees are fewer and interactions with customers are typically face to face. Empowerment and motivation are complex notions. Better understanding of them helps small-business managers better harness their impacts on performance.

Empowerment refers to the employee's feeling of being effective, in control and influential. Empowerment is an amalgam of four related feelings. Autonomy carries a sense of freedom in making choices about how to work and results in the feeling that the person is responsible for her choices. Confidence is the personal feeling of having the ability to perform the job satisfactorily. Meaningfulness is the employee's feeling that the duties of the job are valuable. Finally, impact is the feeling that tasks produce intended results.

Empowerment improves employee commitment, creativity, productivity, satisfaction and motivation. Effective motivation comes from within the individual. Traditional rewards such as monetary compensation are not the best motivators. Appreciation, meaningful work, a happy and flexible work environment and a feeling of personal achievement are powerful motivators. Empowerment is a factor that enables better performance through these mechanisms.

Empowerment can improve job satisfaction and commitment if it increases the feeling of ownership in employees. For example, if an employee has to go to her supervisor for every service decision needing special attention, her self-esteem and feeling of autonomy will suffer. Additionally, sharing information about employee performance and the impact of employees' work on the company as a whole can further improve ownership feelings and boost morale.

Employee empowerment should go hand in hand with training, coaching and creating a collaborative work environment. In any organization, the work of employees is interrelated. The company as a whole should collaborate in good faith for the company to have consistent good performance. Moreover, employees may need coaching and training to cope with increased independence and responsibilities. Far from being a pretext for buck passing, true empowerment increases the spirit of accountability and collaboration. Managers need to listen to employees and address their concerns for the work environment to be genuinely collaborative.

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