Empowerment
David Amerland ????
New book coming out soon: The mind/body connection that helps you stay fit and healthy at any age.
Words matter. Businesses embraced empowerment in the 90s because they saw an opportunity to do more with less. By involving workers in the decision-making process at ground level they were getting greater commitment and were achieving greater job satisfaction (which leads to the direct savings that stem from lower internal operative friction and a lower employee turnover).
Studies now show that while this is true, it did not automatically lead to an improvement of employee performance.
In the classic theoretical work on empowerment, Thomas and Velthouse (1990) conceptualized empowerment as the gestalt of four cognitions: a sense of meaning, competence, self-determination, and impact. Each of these is a construct that can be broken down further into attributes and actions, but for today's newsletter I will focus only on their face value.
Back in 2012 in my book The Social Media Mind I wrote that:
Empowerment is about taking back control and no business or system willingly cedes control without getting something back in return. Primarily productivity.
Which, in turn, is a requirement for a successful business:
领英推荐
Except, of course, we forget that there is a dynamic at work: command and control. Who pulls the strings and who moves to the commands.
Systems have their own logic and this logic leads to an inescapable truth:
This, over time, leads us back to where we started: employees engaged in a tag of war between themselves and the system that wants them to work harder and do more in segments of time that get smaller and smaller.
There is no end to this cycle. Unless of course we are prepared to rethink our concept of work and re-imagine the employer/employee dynamic.
Here's the crux: This is new territory. There are no signposts. No guidebooks. No real precedents. It has to be a process of experimentation and evolution. Trust is needed by those who lead and those who are led. And hope. But combine these two in the right mix and anything is possible.
International Search Strategist - Paving the way to a more rewarding business
4 个月Empowerment will still face the hierarchy of classes on which our society is built for a long time. Indeed, you are right when you say that it is a long process and that a "test" phase must be undertaken. In my opinion, this phase will be even longer because employers, and this is just an assumption based on their status, will find it hard to trust their employees, even if they strongly wish to, as a form of their power over their business will be handed over to a third party. A third party that will not have the same logic, the same vision of how a business should run. In this game of empowerment, I also sincerely believe that empathy has a role to play, and this is perhaps one of the areas where the most effort will be needed. For employers as well as employees.
Exploring how language drives B2B growth
4 个月My recollection of empowerment is something more honoured in the breach than in the observance. No vision statement or set of leadership standards was complete without a liberal sprinkling of empowerment. By and large the culture never changed and organisations reverted to command and control through lack of trust. If you're a line manager on the hook for performance and deadlines you can kind of understand it. How this plays out in the era of flexible working will be fascinating.