Empowerment One of the Dimensions of Empowerment

Empowerment

One of the dimensions of empowerment is competence, where empowered employees feel that they can achieve more and are more confident in their abilities. This can be due to an employee's own personality, with people who have this confidence in themselves more likely to be assertive and apply themselves. This kind of attitude or personality also changes how employees respond to challenges. For employees who have a sense of confidence in themselves, they are likely to be willing to work through a challenge when faced with one. In contrast, employees without confidence are more likely to avoid challenges. It is also important to note that this difference in how challenges are faced also alters the future development of the individual. The empowered employee learns and grows through facing the challenge. This includes gaining knowledge and skills as well as gaining in confidence. The end result is that they become more willing to face future challenges. This shows how competence leads to empowerment, which in turn leads to even greater competence and even greater empowerment. Essentially, empowerment becomes a way that employees continue to develop themselves. As noted, empowerment can occur because of an employee's own personality. In other cases, an organization can increase the empowerment of employees. This means giving employees the skills they need to face challenges. Giving an employee these skills changes their competence level, which in turn makes them more empowered. Employees may also need an environment where they are encouraged to be assertive and apply themselves. One source notes this by stating that an organization where employees are empowered needs to have a culture that supports this.

The right kind of environments acts like an encouragement to employees so that they have the confidence to try and assert themselves even if they do not have high confidence. In doing so, their confidence and ability grows so that they naturally become empowered. This shows how personality and environment are linked to competence and to empowerment.

The next issue that needs to be considered relates to the impact and value of an empowered employee. One of ways that empowered employees are valuable relates to how empowered employees become more skilled and capable. This was described above, where it was noted that empowered employees apply themselves more, especially to challenges in the workplace. The most important point is that this becomes an opportunity for growth, where employees gain more skills, more knowledge, and more capabilities. This makes employees more valuable to the organization. Another way that empowered employees are more valuable relates to the way that they require less supervision. Pfeffer describes this where he notes that empowered employees participate more, make more decisions, and generally manage both themselves and their work more effectively.

This means that employees need less supervision because they become self-managing. Another issue relates to the way that empowered employees become better able to make decisions regarding their jobs because they are the ones that know their own job best. This can be compared to a middle or a senior manager attempting to make decisions without having a clear understanding of the job. One author describes the benefits of this by stating that an organization gains major benefits by removing the power that managers have and giving it to those who are in a better position to do things.

In short, employees know more about their actual jobs and so are in the best position to make changes to improve how they do their jobs. In this way, empowered employees are valuable because they allow for constant improvements.

This leads to a consideration of the major pros of empowerment. These include that employees become more skilled and capable, that less supervision is required, and that employees become a source of improvement. Another author makes an important point by describing how empowered employees have greater job satisfaction and are more motivated.