Empowerment has been something close to the heart of HR professionals for several decades now ...probably since F.W.Taylor's times in these modern times. However as change became more enveloping and dramatic and as the command and control structures in organizations gave way to more flexible structures and models, employees were... empowered and given more autonomy and freedom.
But...it is not enough to empower individual employees. You need two other conditions for the end results (organization effectiveness and innovation) that you would want to pursue as a consequence of empowering people. First, you need creation of "practices that drive empowerment" and "an environment for empowerment". Remember for example "Trust" creates and environment that motivates and drives engagement and resultant discretionary behaviors.
This is why great leaders who drove empowerment and created a wonderful organization at one organization end up failures in some other organization. They could not drive the other two conditions to sufficiency although they would have driven the philosophy of empowering individuals.
As I have said in an earlier post "Context is key" and it is in this connection that "practices" and "environment" play a key role. When practices are present that drive empowerment the relationship between them is positive however that positive relationship only gets strengthened when you have "the empowering environment".
Empowering environment is all about building trust by having the right kind of rewards that drive and encourage empowerment, giving the autonomy where people need, giving them freedom to make decisions, not making it look like a crime when someone commits a mistake [Enabling Risk Taking Behaviors, See Earlier Post on this ] but rather encourage learning from the mistakes, and finally communicating these aspects of your culture.
Empowering practices include things like delegating authority (give them not just responsibility but also authority), giving right feedback in performance processes and Employee Involvement in Decision making. (yes this last one is a practice which actually manifests in how you feel as an employee..)
Today empowerment is here to stay. Whether it is giving employees a voice or a say in key policy decisions or allowing them flexibility in deciding some elements of their compensation structure or even deciding what time they come and what time they leave office.... as well as making substantive contribution in decisions of relevance to the businesses they operated in organizations have done a lot to provide the much needed empowerment.
