Essence Of Empowerment

6 Pages 1484 Words

The Essence of Empowerment Empowerment is certainly not a new idea
within the business arena. In fact, its concept has been around since the
1960's when American car manufactures suddenly realized that they were
losing their butts to the Japanese producers. An extensive and extremely
well-funded investigation for answers to the recurrent question, how do I
get more out of my employees while simultaneously lowering my costs, did
produce some implementable and constructive results. The topic I have
chosen to investigate is the application of employee empowerment and how
to get the most out of this HR "buzzword." Within my scope of discussions
are topics which include effective implementation, the role of the
organization, and incentives to achieve and sustain actuation. Employee
empowerment, in its most basic definition, is effective delegation. The
new twist that upper management has been trying desperately to achieve, is
to involve the lowest level of employees in the decision-making process
while making them responsible for the results of their decisions. There
have been many documented examples of anxiety, mistrust and complacency in
employees when this wave of "new-and-improved, successful management
strategies" have been suddenly thrown upon them. Change of any kind will
usually inspire resistance, especially when you are talking about
extracting power from management to place in the hands of "subordinates."
There are obvious methods to achieving the results that the
stakeholders of an organization demand through empowerment. Increases in
profitability, productivity, creativity, and a shorter time-to-market are
all feasible results of empowerment. In fact, "empowerment is an
extremely cost-effective means of bringing about desired changes in
performance and operational effectiveness." It takes only a stout
devotion of the entire organization, from the top levels downward. That's
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