In the past, leaders' priority was to control, believing that their ideas alone were responsible for efficiency. Todays fast changing technology is forcing the adoption of worker responsibility. ''Throughout history, worker responsibility was implemented when efficiency had priority over control''.
Empowerment is a "process by which individuals and groups gain power, access to resources and control over their own lives. In doing so, they gain the ability to achieve their highest personal and collective aspirations and goals" (Robbins, Chatterjee, & Canda, 1998, p.91). According to Randolph (2000) empowering is Giving people the power to make decisions and ''allowing employees to do whatever they can- including bending and breaking the company rules-to satisfy the customer'' (Tschohl 2003). The discretionary empowerment depends more on the individual's preference for primary or secondary control and so may be partly shaped by aspects of the individual's cultural background like power-distance (Hui et al. 2004). It provides employees with primary control, and it involves management sharing with the employees all information about the organization's performance, (Lawer 1992). The core element of this empowerment is managers giving employees discretion over certain task-related activities (Conger and Kanungo 1988).
There are many theories that contradict the definition of empowering relative to decision making or motivating employees, for example Conger and Kanungo (1988) focus on self-efficacy; Thomas and Velthouse (1990) focus on changes in job design and intrinsic task motivation; Spreitzer (1995) looks at psychological empowerment that refers to internal feelings of self-control and self-efficacy, so its effect on job behaviour should be more universal than culturally specific and suggests that empowerment is a motivational construct manifested in cognitions, which reflect the employee's orientation to his or her work roles (Conger and Kanungo 1988). The four cognitions are meaning, competence, self determination and impact (Spreitzer 1995).
When comparing the two approaches we find that the notion of discretion empowerment can match some cultures more than others, ''for example, in China with its high power-distance culture, members of organizations accept that power is distributed unequally and individuals are accustomed to hierarchal structures and paternalistic leadership'' (Humborstada. W, Bjarte Humborstad B, Whitfield. R and Perry. C 2008). In western organizations where they have lower power-distance, they contradict with the Chinese norms of consulting their superiors before making a decision.
Empowerment stimulates individual employees to deliver quality service as a "discretionary effort" (Malhotra and Mukherjee 2003: 943). Thus service companies benefit from empowerment by improving customer service because employees can be more efficient in solving customers' problems (Hancer and George 2003).
2-Reasons for Empowerment:
Some employers believe that the empowerment issue has become increasingly more important because of the younger generation in the workforce that seems to be driven by different goals that their parents. Humborstad and Whitfield mentioned in their article that ''these employers believe that the workers of the newer generation X seek a more participative than directive leadership style. Generation X'ers is not very accepting of authority. They are very prone to resisting bureaucracy, which leads to decreased productivity and lack of service. They expect a leadership style that is participative, not militaristic''.
And they continue ''Early in the twentieth century, with the extension of scientific management techniques and the assembly line as dominant models of administration and production, industrial managers attempted to assert greater control over the work process. Their initiatives provoked protest from workers who resisted managerial encroachment on their traditional practices of setting the pace of work and regulating productivity. More recently, operating under the rubric of employee involvement, workers and managers have developed new participatory schemes aimed at boosting productivity, improving competitiveness, and decentralizing decision making authority. While the goals and expectations surrounding worker participation and workplace democracy have changed, these concepts have continued to generate interest among both historians and contemporary observers seeking alternatives to a centralized, bureaucratic style of management''.
The positive aspects of Empowerment:
Rayburn. M and Rayburn. G said that '' the increases in autonomy from empowering workers results in increased motivation, job satisfaction, and enhanced job performance. Not only do employees have power to make decisions, they also have useful knowledge and internal motivation to make certain that the company goals are being achieved''.
Building loyalty: When you get a reputation as a manager or leader that gives people the opportunity to grow and develop, staff become incredibly loyal.
Energizing others: When people are energized, they find new ways of breaking down what might have been viewed as obstacles in the past.
Motivation: When a manager or leader tells you the result that they want and leaves it to you to find out the best way to achieve, chances are your motivation increases.
Learning and development: We learn when we do things right. Yet in truth we learn more when things don't quite work out as expected. When things don't work out we take the time to reflect and consider what we would do differently next time. When you empower, you take some risk and allow others to learn and develop from doing a task or project.
Performance: Practice makes perfect, another way of looking at it is to say that empowering improves performance. Changes in performance happen more quickly when people get into action and start doing. Empowering is a great way of improving performance.
Achieving results: All managers and leaders are at the end of the day judged on the results they achieve. Empowering others and leveraging the full range of skills, knowledge, experience and personal attributes at your disposal helps achieve results.
Recruitment and retention: Attracting and retaining good people is a major challenge for many organizations. If you are known as a manager or leader who empowers others, you will start to attract the best and they will stay longer.
Succession planning: Managers and leaders are ambitious and like to keep climbing the career ladder. Many managers and leaders want to ensure that when the time comes for them to move on, there is a batch of people ready to step into their role (Brodie .D 2011).
The negative aspects of empowerment:
Empowerment is often not performed correctly and then fails miserably. As a result, managers blame the concept and do not recognize the true cause of their errors. Empowerment is not for every organization and will not work unless the implementers understand exactly what their objectives are and how to go about attaining them.
Costly Endeavor: Empowerment can be costly; an effective communication can minimize transferable costs. However, such costs cannot be eliminated and remain an obstacle to empowerment.
Time Consuming: Implementing empowerment is not an overnight process but rather a "way of life", which can take time to implement. There are also coordination costs to the firm. Two employees could be working on the same problem at the same time and not even realize it. Since control is in the hands of the employee, management may not be aware that such an event is occurring. This could lead to dual costs for both projects, when the problem could have been solved for half the cost. Also, two employees might require the same information. If they are unaware that the other also needs it, they could accumulate double costs for acquiring the same information to the firm.
Shift Unwanted Responsibility to Employees: In many organizations, employees have viewed management's attempts to empower them and include them in the decision making process with distrust. ''They believe that management is using empowering as a strategy to get something for nothing. They see it as a ploy to get lower level employees to do management's work -- the employee thinks that it is not my job. Employees often view empowering as a way of shifting the burden downward, and they are reluctant to accept that added responsibility. This scenario typically plays out in organizations where distrust has been wide spread. Previously management has made insufficient efforts to communicate its intentions and the envisioned benefits for the empowered employees. Certainly, empowering employees is a collaborative effort. Both the leader and the employee must see value in the empowering process or it will fail''.
Difficulty to Implement in Large Corporations: Koch and Godden (1997) argue that empowerment is a good idea but unworkable for large corporations. They believe empowerment is an inefficient way to run a large corporation; instead, the optimal way for large companies to survive is to have strong leadership and a singular direction. They argue that large corporations benefit from market power and economies of scale. Instead, many researchers argue that empowerment should only be tried in small companies where the risks of failure are less. According to Argyris (1998), it is unrealistic to think that management would allow thousands of employees to have decision making authority without some limits. McClenahen (1995) also agrees that empowerment should not be used in large decentralized companies where performance pressure is substantial and people work at a distance from senior management. Particularly at risk are large, decentralized businesses.
There are many reasons why organizations have failed to create an empowerment work environment:
Management fears they will lose control and power.
Employees are not trusted to complete their tasks and responsibilities or to make decisions.
Previous organizational experiences with empowerment have not worked.
Management lacks the skills to motivate and train others.
Rules and policies are not important than people.
It would mean sharing more information about the organization and the decision-making process with the front line staff.
According to Jamison, There are many reasons why Managers Don't Empower Employees:
They are too busy: Too often managers are so involved in "doing the work", that they lose sight of the fact that they may very well have a team of talented employees who can perform those duties with just a little coaching and direction.
They think it takes too much time: Many managers feel that in the time it takes them to train an employee on a new task, they could have very well taken care of it themselves.
They think it's too risky: Some managers are fearful their employees will make costly mistakes; in essence these managers are unwilling and afraid to take the risk. They don't want to suffer the consequences of a poorly executed decision, even if it is a valuable learning experience for the employee.
They are secretly intimidated: Some managers' question, "what if the employee makes a decision that makes them look smarter than me?"
3-Empowerment process:
Many companies in variety of industries have successfully created cultures of empowerment for example General Electric Co, Pacific Gas and Electric, Marriott Corp. empowerment can work very well but to achieve it the company has to change the way the managers and employees interact. Few managers and employees understand really what empowerment means and to implement it.
The journey to empowerment is long and difficult ''it requires managers and employees to challenge their most basic assumptions about how organizations should operate and how managers and employees should interact in pursuing organizational goals. Significant changes in individuals and collective behaviors are essential''. The skills, attitudes and the relationship between managers and employees are needed.
Chris Argyris has identified the two types of commitment on which progress toward empowerment turns: external commitment and internal commitment. The external commitment is consistent with old style command and control forms of organizations, the manager at this level should:
Define tasks for employees at the level below.
Specify the behaviors required to perform those tasks.
Define performance goals for employees.
Specify the priority of employees' goals.
Internal commitment is more consistent with working in a culture of empowerment; the people are engage in a relationship:
Individual define their own tasks in the context of the company's vision and objectives.
Individuals determine the behavior and action plan required to perform their tasks.
Managers and employees jointly determine goals for individuals.
Employees and manager specify the priority of individual goals and how they relate to the company goals.
This comparison shows how difficult is to change from command-and-control culture to a world of empowerment.
According to Randolph There are three major stages in the process for achieving a culture of empowerment whish are: Starting an orientating the process of change, making changes and dealing with discouragement and adopting and refining empowerment to fit the organization.
Starting an orientating the process of change:
This stage is important to start taking some initial steps from where people are in present and to have the steps founded initially in new forms of information sharing, at this stage people want answers for information concerns for example why the change is needed what is wrong with the way things are now? People need also answers for personal concerns for example how will the change impact me? What is in it for me? How will I find the time to make change?
Although information sharing helps to start the empowerment process but alone cannot keep things moving that why they must use what is called ''creating autonomy through boundaries'' which means setting the goals for the employee or training him in new skills. After that they should use another tool of empowerment which is ''replacing the hierarchy with self-directed teams'', team members help each other interpret and use the shared information more effectively and to clarify boundaries and make good decisions but they don't start off in an empowered mode, they must develop the competencies and motivations to form self-directed teams that take on responsibility.
making changes and dealing with discouragement:
When the first stage is well achieved, we move to the next step where the people encounter more complicated issues and concerns for the implementation and impact.
Implementation concerns: for example what do I do now to be empowered? What must I do next? How do I manage all the details so I do it right? People want to know how to move forward and some fear of failure develop
Impact concerns: questions like is the effort really worth it? Is the effort making a difference for the organization and me? Are we making any positive progress and how do we know? People want to know if their effort are paying off because change is so hard
At this stage people in the organization need to be heard and to some extend everyone, from top to bottom, is feeling confused and discourage, they feel lost. The three tools for empowerment used in the first stage can also be used in this stage for responding to these issues.
adopting and refining empowerment to fit the organization:
At this stage, people begin to feel a sense of competence and confidence to act in an empowered way. The people want answers to collaboration and refinement concerns. They are ready to begin acting with power and with a greater sense of confidence, but they want to become partners in making empowerment a reality.
Collaboration concerns: how do we get everybody involved in empowerment? How do we spread the word that empowerment is working? People are focused in getting everyone on board with empowerment because they are convinced it is making a difference for themselves and the organization.
Refinement concerns: how can we make the changes even better? Can we improve on the original idea? People begin to focus on the proprietary position of continuous improvement on the job and in the organization. They want to use their knowledge, skills, experience, and motivation to achieve results. Employees and managers can now more actively work together as team member to continue the journey to a more full realization of empowerment. The organization must support the new culture because the journey is challenging and demanding.
Caudron (1995, p. 34) provides the following characteristics of an organization's environment that supports empowered employees:
The workplace has established self-directed teams.
Superiors freely share information about the company's directions and goals with the entire employee base.
Employees receive training needed to achieve goals, whether specific work skills or educational issues, such as time management or leadership.
Employees continually develop new work skills.
Managers understand and respect the challenges of an empowering workplace by performing more as coaches instead of bosses. They empower gradually and systematically as team members are ready and do not expect or push for immediate results.
Employees are in control of the resources needed to meet their goals.
The company provides measurements to ensure idea effectiveness of the teams.
Team members are treated to continual positive feedback and reinforcement.
Management should believe that their workforce is capable to deal with the increased flexibility and can make decisions on their own. If managers think their workforce is incompetent to perform at a higher level, empowerment may not occur. Managers must have confidence in employees to proceed with an empowerment program (Rayburn et al).
4- Empowerment process in Ritz-Carlton Hotel:
Ritz-Carlton is counted among the top luxury hotel chains in the world, and was known for its sophisticated and elegant ambience and culture of service excellence. Ritz-Carlton's commitment to quality is demonstrated by the fact that it was the only hotel company to have ever won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and the only service company to have won it twice. It is a great service company that possess its unique culture which affect the recruitment practices, the intensive training program and employee empowerment.
Van Grinsven once said that now-popular term "empowerment" originated with the Ritz-Carlton. Gutierrez put a dollar figure on the employee's resources for solving a problem immediately, without checking with a supervisor. An employee can commit up to $2,000 of the hotel's funds to bring instant resolution to a guest's problem. (Lampton. B 2003)
This figure represents the basic empowerment process used in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The employee welcome the customer entering the hotel, he anticipate the guest need, he directly gives his all attention to the customer and leave his routine duties and applies an immediate positive action toward the customer.
If the customer is not satisfied he rise hi complaint, if he is satisfied he fond farewell, document the incident, returns to his routine duties after entering the in formations in the system.
This table shows how much are the employees empowered in the hotel with comparison with the service company norms. The empowerment is 85% and it's higher by 18% of the percentage of the norms in the service company.
After implementing this process the performance of the company increased during the following years. In 1997 the revenue per hour was around $38, after the process has been put into action in 1997, the revenue started increasing and they were around $47 per hour. it is important to mention that this increase done while empowering the employees that they have the authority to use up to $2000 to solve a problem in the front office. It's also important to mention that this process is not the only reason to have an increase in the revenues but it helped them well.
Kartinah Ayupp and Then Hsiao Chung conduct a study about empowerment. Their objectives were to find out the importance of empowerment in the knowledge era and the findings could help in determining the appropriate tactic in achieving an optimal empowerment program.
The hypotheses were:
H1a: There is significant difference between male and female employees in their perception toward empowerment.
H1b: There is significant difference among employees of varied age in their perception towards empowerment.
H1c: There is significant difference among employees of varied races in their perception towards empowerment.
H1d: There is significant difference among employees of varied academic qualification in their perception towards empowerment.
H1e: There is significant difference among employees of varied years of service in their perception towards empowerment.
To determine the relationship between empowerment and related factors, the hypotheses are:
H2a: There is significant relationship between communication and empowerment.
H2b: There is significant relationship between coaching and empowerment.
H2c: There is significant relationship between participation and empowerment.
H2d: There is significant relationship between training and empowerment.
H2e: There is significant relationship between reward and empowerment.
The findings:
This study was done in Malaysia, Kartinah Ayupp and Then Hsiao Chung concluded that only gender has a significant impact on the employees' perception toward empowerment. Race, age, academic qualification, length of service and salary do not have a significant impact on the employee's perception of empowerment, with the right implementation and support of the management even employee's of the lower level ''can have a sense of personal control over their work''.
Man and woman grow up empowered in different way because they have different set of values that ''create different perspectives through which men and woman see the world''.
"Empowerment doors" that are generally held open to boys tend to be closed to girls, and vice versa. Thus, a woman who wishes to excel in a traditionally male achievement area is likely to meet resistance when she tries to open the door. Furthermore, she finds she is often not taken as seriously as a man would be. Men, on the other hand, often find that their choices and moral judgments about relationships, feelings, and sexuality, if they disagree with women's, are not taken seriously and are even derided.
In addition, the way our culture has examined men's and women's power has hurt men. Although the ways men are empowered have been extensively discussed, the ways women are empowered have not been. The result has been that men are being called upon to give up their special privileges, but women are not being called upon to give up theirs. For this reason as much as any other, men have resisted women's calls for "equality." (Bilgere 2003)
Our society empowers assertive, goal-oriented behavior in men. Goal-oriented people are concerned with changing the external world and getting the job done. Men who are locked into the goal-oriented mode will do anything to reach the goal, even if it requires not taking care of themselves, ignoring their lovers or families, lying, cheating, and paying no heed to their own feelings or to the feelings of others. For goal-oriented people, their value to society and to themselves is based on achieving the goal.
The goal-oriented mode is the mode used in most money-making, political, and business activities. Women, trained to be feeling-oriented, have been kept out of and oppressed in business and politics, the traditionally male achievement areas.
Men are society's judges of how well a job is completed, and they have often been quick to tell women workers they aren't doing the job well enough. Men are society's goal-oriented experts, so society has come to see men's ideas about work and achievement as better than women's ideas. The ability to be obsessively goal-oriented is the basis of male power in the achievement-oriented realms.
Feeling-oriented behavior, on the other hand, is concerned most with how an activity is gone about, and less with whether the goal is completed. The feeling mode emphasizes how relationships are maintained, how people feel about what is going on, taking care of people, and doing the "right thing." Making sure that everyone felt okay about a process was more important than getting the job done quickly and effectively. Women are usually more socialized than men into the feeling-oriented mode. Women are more likely to get their sense of self-worth from how they go about doing things, rather than from what they get done. The ability to be obsessively feeling-oriented is the basis of female power in the feeling and relational realms.
We all have both sides of this paradox within ourselves, and a healthy person can be either goal-oriented or feeling-oriented, depending on the needs of any situation. Unfortunately, during our socialization we tend to be encouraged in one mode and discouraged in the other, depending on our gender. Men and boys are encouraged into the goal-oriented mode and discouraged in the feeling mode; girls and women are more encouraged in the feeling mode and discouraged around achievement. This creates many of the perceived differences between men and women.
According to the ANOVA table we notice that communication has major impact on the perception of empowerment which means that if the communication between managers and employees increases, the perception of empowerment increase, this verified by numerous researches for example Bowen and Lawler (1995) whose findings showed that ''true empowerment can only exist when companies implement practices that distribute power, information, knowledge, and rewards throughout the organization'' and if any of these four elements are absent, then "empowerment will be zero" (Bowen & Lawler, 1995).
The hypothesis that talks about the relation-ship between coaching and the perception of empowerment is accepted but its strength is lower that the communication. This relation-ship is positive which means that if the coaching increases the level of perception of empowerment increases, the same positive impact is showed in the relation between participation and empowerment, but her the strength is higher than the coaching with means that the impact of the participation is higher for example if the level of participation increases by 1 point the perception of empowerment increases by 0.6 point. The participation in the decision making process is very important for example the front office employee in the hotel can make decisions to solve the customer problems without referring to his supervisor.
Training has the lowest impact on the perception of empowerment but still positive, training the employees' increases the level of perception of empowerment and the hotels must sustain adopt training programs to their employees to have the required knowledge, skills to perform their work. Training has the lowest impact because training along would not lead to empowerment, even the skilled employees with all the training if he has not good communication and has the decision making authority he will not be empowered.
The reward has an impact on the perception of empowerment as coaching, when the management increases the reward system the perception of empowerment increases. This finding is congruent with the findings of Bowen and Lawler (1995) that identify ''employees' perceived fairness in rewards and knowledge in how rewards are distributed as significant contributors to their sense of empowerment''.
''Thus it could be concluded that in order to be successful, empowerment involves management practices that adopt an open communication and sharing of knowledge, power and rewards throughout the organization'' (Bowen & Lawler, 1995).
5-Summary and conclusion:
As a summary, there are two theories for empowerment, one that focuses on the gaining power to the employees to take decisions and the second focuses on self-efficacy and on changes in job design. There are many reasons for empowering people for example boosting productivity, improving competitiveness; it has many advantages and disadvantages, we mentioned the reasons why managers don't empower employees, how the journey to empowerment is long and difficult and how we can achieve a culture of empowerment. We studied to process of empowerment in Ritz-Carlton Hotel and how well they adopt empowerment and we studied the major factors that affect the perception of empowerment and the relation-ship between empowerment and several factor. We concluded that gender has a significant impact on the employees' perception toward empowerment.
The case study was done in Malaysia, all the races studied have the same culture, and we couldn't study the difference of the perception of empowerment related to different cultures. According to a study done by my colleague about the motivation in our culture, the results show that our culture is related to the theory X for motivation which means that applying empowerment in the hotels in Lebanon is difficult and may not contribute to the results expected. People in Lebanon need to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of controls developed. We need to make big changes to set the ground for the employees to accept such a culture.
