Concept Of Empowerment

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1. Empowerment
Empowerment is a term that is widely used within any organizations. Many managers view empowerment as letting go of control and giving people power to make decisions, while many employees think empowerment means they are free to do whatever they want. Even among different theorists, there is no agreement upon its definitions.
Although theorists have used various methods to define the concept of empowerment, there are two general definitions known as environmental empowerment or role empowerment, and psychological empowerment. Environmental empowerment or role empowerment means managerial actions or strategies to authorize and transfer decision-making power from top management to lower level of the organization (Labianca, Gray, …show more content…

Later then, to complete the empowerment theory of Conger and Kanungo, Thomas and Velthouse (1990) introduced a model presenting psychological empowerment in terms of intrinsic task motivation including four cognitive components, which are impact, competence, meaningfulness, and choice.
• Impact: relates to the individual expectation of having influences on strategic and operating outcomes at work. Employees believe that they have significant role in helping the organization achieve its goals.
• Competence: refers to self-efficacy at work, which means employees feel that they have enough knowledge and skills, and believe they are qualified to perform a work successfully. By having high self-efficacy, employees have more confidence to encounter new challenges, accept new responsibilities and guidelines for action (Conger & Kanungo, 1988). In contrast, low self-efficacy leads people to have avoidance behavior, which in turn prevents them from confronting fears and improving their perceived competence (Bandura, …show more content…

These are supposed to provide employees more information and increase their control over their work, which then leads to performance improvement. Spreitzer (1995) also suggested that high-performance managerial practices facilitate higher degree of psychological empowerment because it affects all four cognitions. By having more information and control, employees will see how meaningful their work is (meaningfulness), believe how it helps organization to achieve its larger goals (impact), and know which actions they should take (choice). Besides, high-performance managerial practices enhance one’s knowledge and skills which helps employees believe they have abilities to perform their work well (competence).
• Socio-political support: means useful resources provided for employees, which are, for example, resource availability, organizational culture and supports, work group climate, and trust (between managers and employees). Hobfoll (1989) suggested that social support is indeed valuable to shape one’s perception and emotional

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