Employee Empowerment and Its Importance for Trust, Innovation and Organizational Performance

In order to strengthen their competitiveness, companies have to look for ways that allow them to be innovative and to achieve better performance. To reach these objectives, previous researches suggested that companies must implement motivational managerial practices. In particular, employee empowerment is recognized as a key for building trustful-relationships in the organizations, which in turn lead to innovation and higher level of performance. In this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of employee empowerment on both innovation and organizational performance and to explore the mediating role of trust in these relationships. The main result of the empirical study conducted with a sample of 248 firms belonging to ICT Tunisian sector is that employee empowerment has a positive effect on trust, innovation and organizational performance.