Empowerment is the process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision-making in autonomous ways.
Empowerment has become necessary due to the following reasons:
- Time to respond has become much shorter.
- First-line employees must make many decisions.
- An employee feels much more control in their life since authority is given to individual decision-making.
- There is great untapped potential among employees, which can be revealed through empowerment.
Definitions:
- According to Richard Kathnelson, ’empowerment is the process coming to feel and behave as if one is in power and to feel as if they owned the firm’.
- According to Bowen and Lawler, ’employee empowerment refers to the management strategies for sharing decision-making power’.
Employee empowerment can be done by:
- Seeking opinions from the employees.
- Facilitating the employees to try their ideas.
- Encouraging for sharing of resources and information.
- Improving the communication skills of the employees.
Importance of Employee Empowerment:
- The investment in employees can improve productivity, which can reduce the costs.
- Individual employees experience a feeling of self-esteem, self-efficacy and self-confidence.
- Employee empowerment also helps in making employees more self-reliant.
- It allows independent decision-making by the employees.
- Empowerment of employees helps a firm to assign different projects to hone the competence of employees.
- More freedom given to employees can be utilized for taking judicious decisions.
- Assigning proper authority can improve the organizational effectiveness.
- Independent decision-making can improve self-confidence among the employees.
- It can boost up the morale of the employees.
- The overall efficiency of an organization can be multiplied due to empowerment of the employees.
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