Organization Conditions Enabling Employee Empowerment and the Moderating Role of Individual Personalities

Abstract

Empowerment is considered a key driver of organization growth. Companies are realizing that in today's knowledge economy, high levels of supervision and direction actually hamper the full utilization of the employees' potential to contribute towards the overall organization's objectives. Data was gathered from 243 employees to understand what really counts as empowerment and what impact it has on their effectiveness at work, their levels of innovation, leadership skills, commitment to the organization and their ability to manage stressful situations at the workplace. The research shows that except stress management, a highly empowered workplace has a strong positive correlation to all the above mentioned factors- at least as far as employee perceptions are concerned. The more interesting fact emanates when one tries to see if the personality of the employees also has any impact in all of this. The results clearly show that employees with higher levels of core self evaluation, self-efficacy, risk taking abilities, pro-activeness and an internal locus of control will do best only when provided with a work culture that allows for their empowerment. In fact, wider the gap between the employees personality type and the work environment in terms of empowerment, the poorer will be the outcome on all these parameters-effectiveness, innovation, leadership skills, commitment and stress management. Interestingly, the reverse isn't true. Providing a more empowered environment than what employees are thought to be able to handle (in case of employees with lower levels of self efficacy, etc.) does not lead to any similar negative consequences.