Empowerment: Rejuvenating a potent idea

Executive Overview Empowerment is a tantalizing notion that seems to offer organizations the promise of more focused, energetic, and creative work from employees. But after years of trying, many organizations have not realized the promise the idea held. This article presents some reasons why: precipitous empowerment mandates, overreliance on a narrow psychological concept of empowerment, one-size-fits-all empowerment, neglecting the needs of power sharers, a piece-meal approach, and distortions of accountability. This article offers some ways to implement empowerment programs more effectively: enlarge power, be sure of what you want to do, differentiate among employees, support power sharers, build fitting systems, and focus on results. The article contends that empowerment is still a useful concept that we need to learn to apply better.