Empowerment
This week we read the article Empowerment: Rejuvenating a potent idea by Russ Forrester. The article discusses how different companies utilize empowerment to motivate their employees and the results of their efforts and methods for bettering results utilizing other methods to empower employees. The article begins with examples of corporations and methods they used to empower employees that backfired. For example, one company decided to give decision making authority to all line employees, previously on their managers had been given decision making authority. This empowerment given to the line employees, backfired... The employees were not empowered to make decisions, but scared and nervous. The supervisor’s scrambled to gain control, because they were unsure who and if decisions were being made or not... Another company used power as a commodity like a monetary reward. This also had ill effects because power was used somewhat as something to gain for some and not others. As it usually turns out money and or power is used for the wrong reasons. I think the article illustrated show how not to empower employees very well, the article also discussed techniques to empower employees.
The article makes the excellent distinction that you do need to give actual power to empower employees. The article states that you must invest in the employee to empower the employee, similar to the empowerment techniques in our text, empowerment is about the individual. You may indeed give them more power, but they must also be given the resources and tools to utilize the power correctly. Individuals given power must have outcome based results, individuals need to know the benefits or consequences of using their power. Individuals given the resources to use their power effectively will succeed in their task. Unrestrained power given to an unknowledgeable individual has had historic poor outcomes and the cycle will continue if power is given and used incorrectly.
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