What is Empowerment?
Empowerment refers to giving more power to the employees in terms of resources, skills, tools and authority necessary to make decisions.
Empowerment definition
Empowerment refers to giving more power to the employees in terms of resources, skills, tools and authority necessary to make decisions. Employees are then either rewarded or held accountable for their decisions.
Empowerment is a long-term strategy that involves time and resource investment from the company’s leaders.
How to utilize empowerment
Empowerment can be utilized by using three tools:
1. Information sharing
2. Creating autonomy through boundaries
3. Replacing old hierarchies with self-managed teams
Examples for employee empowerment:
- giving them more liberty and more space
- providing an option to work from home
- providing a choice of the area of work etc
- providing the option of 'unlimited vacation' policy
Benefits and disadvantages of empowerment
The benefits of empowerment is that the employees are happier and have more motivation. It also reduces superviosry requirements and increases innovation and creativity. This leads to greater job satisfaction and lesser attrition.
Disadvantages of empowerment:
- increased risk as employees become more entrepreneurial and more likely to take chances
- security issues since all important information must be shared with employees so they can make their own decisions