Professional Documents
Culture Documents
520 Employee Empowerment
520 Employee Empowerment
EMPOWERMENT
A primary goal of employee empowerment is to
give workers a greater voice in decisions about
work-related matters.
Their decision-making authority can range from
offering suggestions to exercising veto power
over management decisions.
possible areas include: how jobs are to be
performed, working conditions, company
policies, work hours, peer review, and how
supervisors are evaluated
Organizational improvement
through employee empowerment
First, empowerment can strengthen motivation
by providing employees with the opportunity to
attain intrinsic rewards from their work, such as
a greater sense of accomplishment and a feeling
of importance.
Intrinsic rewards such as job satisfaction and a
sense of purposeful work can be more powerful
than extrinsic rewards such as higher wages or
bonuses.
The second means by which employee
empowerment can increase productivity is
through better decisions. Especially when
decisions require task-specific knowledge,
those on the front line can often better
identify problems.
TOYOTA
Toyota Motor Company empowers some
of its employees to identify and help
remedy problems occurring during product
assembly. An automobile coming off
Toyota's assembly line with a paint defect
is seen as an opportunity to delve into the
root cause of the defect, as opposed to
merely fixing the defect and passing it on
to distributors for resale.
Solutions resulting from employee
involvement tend to have more employee
buy-in when it comes to implementation.
Because such solutions are generated
from the front lines, this further enhances
the potential for productivity improvements
by reducing the attitude that solutions are
"passed down from above."
A number of different human resource
management programs are available that
grant employee empowerment to some
extent. A number of these are discussed in
the following sections, including informal
participative decision-making programs,
job enrichment, continuous improvement,
and self-managed work teams.
INFORMAL PARTICIPATIVE
DECISION-MAKING PROGRAMS
Informal participative decision-making programs
involve managers and subordinates making joint
decisions on a daily basis. Employees do not
enjoy blanket authority to make all work-related
decisions; managers decide just how much
decision-making authority employees should
have in each instance. The amount of authority
varies depending on such situational factors as
decision complexity and the importance of
employee acceptance of the decision.
While it may seem obvious, one key to
empowerment is choosing under what
conditions to empower employees.
Employees should be empowered in
situations where they can make decisions
that are as good as, or better than, those
made by their managers.
One possible problem is that the interests of
workers may not align with those of the
organization. For example, at one university a
department head delegated the task of
determining job performance standards to the
faculty. Because the faculty believed that it was
not in their own best interest to develop
challenging standards, the standards they
eventually developed were easily attainable.
The success of empowerment also often hinges
on whether employees want to participate in
decision making. Some employees, for instance,
have no desire to make work-related decisions.
Suggestions for increasing employee participation
levels include work situations where:
Temporary teams
Frequently cross-functional
Focused on a particular project
Leadership
Steering committees
Advisory councils
Self-Directed
Small teams
Little or no status differences among
team members
Have authority to decide how to get the
work done
Virtual