Empowerment in the workplace
Empowerment can be defined in many ways but basically it describes the process in which a superior delegates authority and responsibility to a subordinate (Pelit et al., 2011 as cited in Appelbaum et al., 2014).
In this article, the authors reviewed a variety of factors that affect a successful implementation of empowerment in workplace, such as empowerment model, organizational culture, company size, etc. With regards to empowerment models, both models which were discussed in the article emphasized information sharing as the critical factor for a successful implementation of empowerment.
Appelbaum et al. (2014) noted that though information sharing alone was insufficient for empowerment to occur, it was one of the most fundamental requirements. It is needless to say that without information no one can make a good decision, so do employees. However, from the managers' perspective, sharing information means that they would lose control of information and thus lose their power.
I think that the authors made a very interesting point when they correlated information sharing to level of trust between managers and employees. The higher level of trust, the more information will be shared.
Obviously, trust need to be built over time while the employees are working in the company. For the employees, they need to demonstrate that they thoroughly understand their jobs, roles, and functions in the organization and they commit to contribute to the development of the company. Moreover, they need to show a high level of confidence, autonomy, and responsibility.
When it comes to the managers, they need to encourage and support a decision-making environment in their organization as well as to provide their employees opportunities, tools, and knowledge that the employees need to develop professional skills and to reach to full performance. The most important point is that the leaders should adopt the thinking that power delegation is essential for sustaining and developing the business in the long term. The leaders alone would never be capable to drive the organization to success as they cannot do everything by themselves and thus they always need cooperation and contribution from their employees.
My last job in the U.S. Consulate General is a good example of trust and information sharing in the workplace. My major responsibility was to administer the consulate’s website and social media pages. When I first came to the office, I was not allowed to access to the administrative page where I could change the settings, make new posts, and see audience statistics because according to our policy, the login information was categorized as “Sensitive but Unclassified” information which we, the local-employed staff could not access. Every post published on these pages needed to be reviewed and posted by my American supervisor, in this case, the Information Officer.
In addition, without access to the statistics, I could not know which topics were interesting to our audience and thus could not compose engaging posts. These undoubtedly caused so much hassle and over time my supervisor realized that he could not handle all the work by himself when the number of channels that we had to take care of was growing substantially and he could rely on my capacity of making good judgment and decisions to get things done faster and more effectively.
Therefore, my supervisor addressed the issue by sending me overseas for professional training on managing website and social media, granting me administrative access to the pages, and delegating more authority and autonomy to me to do my job. His role had gradually transformed to be more coaching and shadowing rather than reviewing and executing. In our example, trust and access to sufficient information had led to tremendous boost in performance, efficiency, work satisfaction for both the manager and the employee.
It is obvious that the more access to information, the higher risk of information security. The article has left a few questions unanswered. First, what could the possible impacts be when the information is misused intentionally or unintentionally? Second, how could the manager assess and minimize the risk?
Reference:
Appelbaum, S., Karasek, R., Lapointe, F., & Quelch, K. (2014). Employee empowerment: Factors affecting the consequent success or failure – Part I. Industrial and Commercial Training, 46 (7), 379-386. Retrieved from http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/ICT-05-2013-0033
