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Empowerment: theoryand practice

Adrian WilkinsonSchool of Management, UMIST, Manchester, UK

IntroductionIn recent years, the term empowerment has become part of everydaymanagement language (Collins, 1994; Cunningham et al., 1996; Hennestad, 1998;Wilkinson, 1998). It has also been associated with popular managementmovements of the times such as human resource management (HRM) and totalquality management (TQM). Empowerment is regarded as providing a solutionto the age-old problem of Taylorised and bureaucratic workplaces wherecreativity is stifled and workers become alienated, showing discontent throughindividual or collective means.

There are a number of problems with the existing prescriptive literature onempowerment. First, the term is used very loosely and it is not always clear ifwe are comparing like with like. Second, it is rarely located in a historicalcontext: empowerment is seen as an entirely new phenomenon. Third, there islittle detailed discussion of the issues likely to arise when implementingempowerment or the conditions which are necessary for such an approach to besuccessful. It is assumed that employers will simply welcome the new approach,seeing it as beneficial to them and the organisation. The literature also takes auniversalistic approach, regarding empowerment as appropriate to allorganisations in all circumstances. Fourth, the literature trivialises the conflictthat exists with organisations and ignores the context within whichempowerment takes place (Marchington, 1995). In this paper we examine theroots of empowerment, examine why it came into prominence in recent years,suggest a classification of empowerment, and discuss the evidence as to itsimpact.

The term “empowerment” is generally used to refer to a form of employeeinvolvement initiative which was widespread from the 1980s and focused ontask-based involvement and attitudinal change. Unlike industrial democracythere is no notion of workers having a right to a say: it is employers who decidewhether and how to empower employees. While there is a wide range ofprogrammes and initiatives which are titled empowerment and they vary as tothe extent of power which employees actually exercise, most are purposefullydesigned not to give workers a very significant role in decision making butrather to secure an enhanced employee contribution to the organization.Empowerment takes place within the context of a strict management agenda.

Personnel Review, Vol. 27 No. 1, 1998, pp. 40-56,© MCB University Press, 0048-3486

A version of this article will appear in Poole, M. (Ed.), IEBM Handbook of Human ResourceManagement, to be published by International Thomson Publishing in 1998.

Received April 1997Revised October 1997Accepted October 1997

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Empowerment schemes tend to be direct and based on individuals or smallgroups (usually the work group), a clear contrast with industrial democracyand participative schemes such as consultative committees which arecollectivist and representative in nature.

Empowerment in contextTaking a historical perspective, innovations at work group level can be seen aslong-standing. Prior to the industrial revolution, goods were made by craftsmenwho had responsibility for the entire process. Up to the turn of the century,automobiles were constructed by skilled craftsmen who planned production,solved design problems and constructed the car as a unit (Gartman, 1978, p.195). In the 1920s the ideas of F.W. Taylor, the father of scientific management,were influential in getting management to break jobs down into small tasks anddecide the best method of carrying out each task using work study methods.Under this regime, workers had little discretion with conception separate fromexecution, and brainpower was to be centred with management. The systemwas based on worker compliance. While scientific management was verysuccessful in terms of boosting productivity, there was concern over thealienation of workers reflected in high labour turnover, absenteeism andconflict. The work of Elton Mayo and the Human Relations School criticisedTaylorism and suggested that involving workers had strong business as well asmoral benefits. Workers could be self-motivated and carry out good workwithout close supervision (Rose, 1978).

With many problems apparent with traditional forms of work organisationthere has been continuing interest in getting workers more involved, althoughthe type of initiative fashionable has waxed and waned over time. In the 1960sjob enrichment was established as an alternative work paradigm, the aim beingto provide meaningful work for employees with some degree of control andfeedback on performance (Buchanan, 1979). In short intrinsic motivation wasseen as critical to job satisfaction and jobs were to be enriched by reintegratingmaintenance tasks and providing some decision-making opportunities. Walton(1985) lists firms such as General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and Mars asleaders in work innovation in the USA during this time. In the 1970s there wasgreater interest in industrial democracy which emphasised workers’ rights toparticipate, and legislative backing for worker directives in much of WesternEurope (excluding the UK) provided impetus for such structures. By the 1980snew forms of participation were developed less concerned with the concept ofjoint negotiation and with much greater emphasis on employee involvementsuch as quality circles, team briefing and profit sharing as part of a wider set ofreforms in working practices. The key point about these schemes is that theydid not challenge management prerogative (Ackers et al., 1992; Marchington etal., 1992).

It was the late 1980s which saw empowerment emerge in its modern form.While earlier involvement initiatives may have been empowering,empowerment needs to be seen in a particular business and political context.

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The rhetoric of enterprise which reflected the shift to the political right inWestern Europe and the USA underpinned the new management approach(Legge, 1995). The discourse of empowerment fitted with notions of enterpriseculture with individuals seen as entrepreneurs taking destiny into their ownhands no longer encumbered by bureaucratic rules and union obstruction. Suchideas were advocated by the influential popular management writers of thisperiod, including Peters (1989) and Schonberger (1990) whose ideas popularisedapproaches such as TQM and HRM. Peters (“involve everyone in everything;leading by empowering people”) and Schonberger (“we want take chargeemployees”) both exhorted organisations to empower staff as mass productionin a predictable environment was no longer seen as the norm. A flood of booksadvocating empowerment began to appear (Byman, 1991; Foy, 1994).

In retrospect it could be argued that Peters and Waterman’s much deridedbestselling book, In Search of Excellence, published in 1982, was influential inhelping lay the foundations for the modern empowerment movement. Whilemany may not have read the book, their perceived wisdom and buzzwordsbecame fully dispersed within management circles. A central message was theneed to move away from the hard rationalist models driven by accountants andengineers to a more simple intuitive style of management. “Productivitythrough people”, “autonomy and entrepreneurship” summed up the newphilosophy which when combined with “the customer is king” provided thecontext for current empowerment ideas. The message was that successfulorganisations focused on managing culture. Implicit in this analysis was theview that managers could unleash the talents of individuals by dismantlingorganisational bureaucracy. Managers were exhorted to trust and involveemployees. Different forms of control were demanded. “Simultaneous loose-tight properties” referred to control through shared values (customer service,etc.) with employees having greater discretion with regard to how they carriedout their jobs to meet these core corporate values.

By the late 1980s business thinking had become attracted by the notion ofnew modes of managing. It was argued that markets were now morecompetitive (indeed turbulent and chaotic) partly owing to the globalisation ofcompetition and liberalisation by governments, and customers were becomingmore demanding in terms of choice, quality, design and service. In the privatesector organisations were now targeting their products at niche markets andattempting to respond swiftly to customer demands rather than selling mass-produced goods in stable markets. Nor was the public sector immune from suchpressures as privatisation and commercialisation which increased pressure onthem to meet various performance criteria. As a result the emphasis changedfrom utilising economies of scale to more flexible, innovative and responsiveorganisations. This shift was variously referred to as post-Fordism, flexiblespecialisation and lean production. The new management paradigmemphasised by writers such as Drucker (1988) and Kanter (1989) include de-bureaucratisation (end of hierarchy and prescriptive rules), and delayering, de-

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centralisation and the utilisation of project-based teams as part of a movementtowards a new knowledge-based organisation.

The new approach carried implications for people management andemployers were urged to move away from an approach based on compliance,hierarchical authority and limited employee discretion to one where there wasgreater emphasis on high trust relations, teamworking and empowerment, withcalls for employee commitment and the utilisation of workforce expertise(Hyman and Mason, 1995; Walton, 1985). Furthermore, sectoral and labourmarket changes shifted the balance of power to employers so as to facilitate theintroduction of empowerment and other employee involvement mechanisms,which changed work relationships on employers’ terms. Whereas theScandinavian experiments were born of a political and economic context with astrong labour movement and supportive government, the context ofempowerment was quite different.

The quality movement was also influential during this period. While itsprinciples had been developed by Japanese companies in the late 1950s and1960s, interest in the West peaked in the 1980s, and there appeared to be astrong message of empowerment (Wilkinson et al., 1992). Under TQM,continuous improvement is undertaken by those involved in a process and thisintroduces elements of bottom-up issue identification and problem solving. As aresult TQM may empower employees by delegating functions that werepreviously the preserve of more senior organisational members and as a resultinstitutionalise participation on a permanent basis (Hill, 1991, p. 541). Thussupervisory roles are taken over by workers particularly in relation to qualitycontrol. Operators could use their tacit knowledge of work processes to achievesubstantially higher levels of quality, with the task of management to create theconditions which would facilitate such efforts. However, operators’ activitywould be confined to diagnosing improvements in their own work, notnecessarily being able to implement these themselves unless the organisationhad also moved towards semi-autonomous working that combined authoritywith the responsibility for work. Middle managers become facilitators,encouraging participation, teamwork and the delegation of responsibility andaccountability and this helps foster pride, job satisfaction, and better work. Thepractice of continuous improvement is seen as increasing employeeinvolvement in decision making, although there is little discussion as to whetherit is relatively low grade task-centred involvement or a more significant form ofparticipation and shared decision making. In practice there is a basic ambiguityin TQM in that, while employers seek the commitment and empowerment oftheir employees, increased control over the work process is a cornerstone ofTQM (Hill and Wilkinson, 1995, pp. 14-16).

There is also a profoundly negative force which has driven the empowermentinitiatives. In the 1980s and 1990s rationalisation and downsizing were verymuch the order of the day. In this context empowerment became a businessnecessity as the destaffed and delayered organisation could no longer functionas before. In this set of circumstances, empowerment was inevitable as tasks

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had to be allocated to the survivors in the new organisation. Thus talk ofenrichment and job satisfaction were very much secondary to simply gettingthe job done. The business process re-engineering movement reflected thesetypes of considerations.

The roots of empowermentIt is easy to assume empowerment is simply a new phenomenon in thatstandard texts on involvement and participation make scant reference to theterm (see for example, Brannen, 1983; Marchington, 1992; Poole, 1986). Thusmany accounts write as if empowerment is entirely a product of the times anddo not see it in a historical context. However, one could argue that, althoughempowerment in its current form reflects recent developments, the basis andideas underlying it go much deeper. Empowerment can be seen in manyrespects as a rejection of the traditional classical model of managementassociated with Taylor and Ford where standardised products were madethrough economies of scale and the division of labour, and workers carried outfragmented and repetitive jobs. Economic man was seen as accepting a trade-off of high wages (extrinsic motivation) for poor quality of working life.

Two broad sets of arguments have been used to justify the utilisation ofempowerment. First, democratic humanism which is usually seen as a responseto the excesses of scientific management and problems of alienation. Associatedwith enlightened managers, this view of human nature can be seen in the workof McGregor and his Theory X and Theory Y constructs. While Theory Xassumes employees dislike work and shirk responsibility and are motivatedpurely by financial considerations, Theory Y takes a more positive view ofhuman nature, assuming employees would prefer to exercise self-control andcontribute to the organisation so as to meet their needs for self-actualisation.These sets of assumptions were also reflected in the work of humanistpsychologists such as Maslow with his model of the hierarchy of needs, andalso Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory (Watson, 1995). Participation wouldsatisfy human growth needs of self-actualisation and fulfilment and throughthis mechanism increase motivation and performance. The socio-technicalsystems school stressed the need to design technical and social componentsalongside each other to optimise the two and their influential study ofcoalmining in Britain showed how work could be re-designed within theexisting technical basis so as to retain traditional features such as skill varietyand a degree of autonomy (Trist et al., 1963). In the 1970s the quality of workinglife (QWL) movement consolidated and developed these ideas and put them intopractice, most famously in the Swedish car plants such as Volvo at Kalmar.Furthermore it has been argued that developments in the broader political andsocial environment including more educated workers has led to a higher level ofexpectation concerning quality of working life (Cotton, 1993).

Second, there is an economic case for empowerment which is essentiallypragmatic. It is assumed first that workers have the opportunity to contributeto organisational success and as they are closer to the work situation they may

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be able to suggest improvements which management would be unable to byvirtue of their position in the hierarchy. Empowerment would also increase jobsatisfaction and reduce turnover as workers feel more committed toorganisational goals. In addition, as workers are empowered this reduces theneed for complex and indeed dysfunctional systems of control, hence increasingefficiency. In the 1980s the new flexible organisation paradigm reinforced sucharguments. The move to customised products with flexible specialisation (Pioreand Sabel, 1983) and flatter and leaner structures was seen as the new route tocompetitive advantage and this meant increasing focus on labour as a resourcenot just a cost. Furthermore, jobs were seen as far more complex than in thedays of scientific management and change much quicker. It was seen as vital toachieve greater flexibility through the use of people. Rather than trying tocontrol employees, they should be given discretion to provide better service andachieve a higher standard of work. The argument emphasised the need forfaster decisions in a changing marketplace with employees closest to thecustomer/product best placed to make decisions concerning related issues.

All these theories share a common assumption that workers are an untappedresource with knowledge and experience and an interest in becoming involvedwhich can be released by employers providing opportunities and structures fortheir involvement. It is also assumed that participative decision making is likelyto lead to job satisfaction and better quality decisions and that gains areavailable both to employers (increased efficiency) and workers (job satisfaction),in short an everyone wins scenario.

Classifying empowermentA central problem in this field is that the term empowerment has been usedvery loosely by practitioners and indeed academics. At its simplest,empowerment would commonsensically be associated with the redistribution ofpower, but in practice empowerment is usually seen as a form of employeeinvolvement, designed by management and intended to generate commitmentand enhance employee contributions to the organisation. While some forms ofemployee involvement may provide employees with new channels throughwhich their influence is enhanced, employee involvement does not involve anyde jure sharing of authority or power. With employee involvement, the onus ison employers to involve employees or give employees the opportunity to beinvolved. Empowerment in the context of its usage in recent years can be seenas reflecting this approach. It is individualist rather than collectivist in itsorientation, i.e. empowerment is based on individual workers or work groupsbut not on larger groups such as trade unions. It encompasses directinvolvement in work practices rather than indirect. Financial participation andrepresentative participation were not part of the agenda, rendering it distinctfrom other forms of employee involvement, employee participation andindustrial democracy. Thus a distinction could be made between empowermentinitiatives as defined above and initiatives which may empower (the latterincluding industrial democracy).

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The new rhetoric is significant. The term is associated with an upbeat viewof management and the vague but positive associations make the appealimmediate and extensive. But one needs to question who is empowering whomand why, as well as examining to whom do the benefits (if any) belong? Nodoubt the empowerment movement appropriates language from wider politicalmovements – feminism, and the ecology movement where empowerment is seenas a positive force, but a key difference is that these movements are rooted in theoppressed, i.e. helping people to help themselves, whereas the empowermentmovement is driven by those in power, i.e. helping managers to manage theorganisation (Hennestad, 1998).

Empowerment can be seen as a flexible and even elastic term (Cunninghamet al., 1996; Lashley, 1997). It clearly fits within the voluntarist tradition whichleft managers and workers (in practice reflecting power structures, usually theformer) to decide on a suitable approach for the organisation. Empowermentcan also be seen as different from the 1970s QWL movement which emphasisedlabour issues such as job satisfaction, absenteeism and labour turnover. Indeedto some extent the 1970s participative movement had a negative aim: to keepemployers quiescent, i.e. make them conform to the contract (Ramsay, 1977)rather than the more recent manifestation where a greater (i.e. beyond contract)commitment is sought. In contrast empowerment emphasises more directbusiness considerations, such as quality, flexibility and productivity. It ismanagement who empowers employees and the initiatives have tended to coverdirect workforce involvement over a relatively small number of issues usuallyconnected with the production process or service delivery, with the rationalethat highly committed and empowered staff were more likely to engage in abeyond contract effort, i.e. beyond the normal call of duty. There has tended tobe little union negotiation concerning the principle of the initiative (anempowerment paradox) with design and planning excluding unioninvolvement. In practice, however, issues arising out of the implementation ofempowerment often become industrial relations matters. For example jobenlargement can threaten traditional demarcation lines as well as raiseremuneration issues.

What the quantitative growth of empowerment initiatives means forempowerment in practice is another issue. There is a tendency in the existingliterature to lump together all the various forms of empowerment (Lashley,1997). No categorisation scheme for empowerment is entirely satisfactory as theboundaries between different types are not clear and much depends on thedefinition adopted. With empowerment not existing as a single unified entity, itcan cover a very wide range of schemes, which in turn may involve a variety ofdiverse management motivations. However, they are united by sharing acommon assumption that employees’ and employers’ interests are inextricablyconnected. They can range from the mechanistic (i.e. structural change) to themore organic (concerned with attitudes/culture). However, taking account ofthese notes of caution we can identify five main types, namely information

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sharing, upward problem solving, task autonomy, attitudinal shaping, and self-management.

Information sharingFor employers to be empowered, information is a central component. There hasbeen a great deal of interest in recent years in management increasingdownward communication to employees typically via newsletters, themanagement chain or team briefing, which communicates organisational goalsand the business position of the organisation to win hearts and minds. The logichere is that employees will be more understanding of the reasons for businessdecisions and as a result more committed to the organisation’s action. Moreover,communication is direct to the workforce rather than being mediated byemployee representation or trade unions. Thus critics have argued that suchschemes incorporate workers and/or by-pass trade unions and is designed notto provide better information to empower workers but convince them of thelogic of management action and hence reduce the scope for genuineempowerment, i.e. the opportunity to influence or change decisions.

In short, it may be a form of pseudo-participation (Pateman, 1970) with amove away from “you will do this” to “this is why you will do this” (Wilkinsonet al., 1993, p. 28).

It is also seen as important that employees should have the opportunity toexpress their views and grievances openly and independently through a form ofupward communication, rather than being able to raise only task-relatedproblems. Of course voice could be achieved through trade union organisationand collective bargaining, through formally established grievance and disputesprocedures but empowerment tends to favour individual action through speak-up schemes which offer employees protection if their complaints are not heardsympathetically. Employees may also be asked to collect information outsidetheir immediate work group, perhaps through cross-functional teams, as issueshere may impact on their work. This introduces a horizontal communicationdimension. It is usually accompanied by a problem-solving aspect as well (seebelow).

Upward problem solvingAgain there are various dimensions to this form of empowerment. Within theexisting job this may involve informing management of problems and lettingthem deal with them. A typical example in manufacturing would be workershaving the ability to halt the line because of production problems or defectivematerial. In services employees may be able to make customer-related decisions(e.g. replacing defective products). In short, there may be greater autonomy andresponsibility at the point of production or service delivery. Outside the jobbasic work process itself is suggestion involvement (Bowen and Lawler, 1992),where workers make suggestions but management decide whether to act onthese, or more significant where workers have some autonomy through qualitycircles/groups/teams, addressing problems and in some cases implementing

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improvements themselves. This reflects Morton’s (1994) idea that workers havetwo jobs: one is to carry out designated tasks and the other is to search forimprovements.

Task autonomyAt its most basic level this may mean removing inspectors from the productionline as workers take on wider responsibility, or it may involve the moresignificant restructuring of work units into cells (often around product flows)teams or the creation of semi-autonomous work groups now commonly referredto as teamworking or self-managing teams. This differs from job rotation,enlargement and enrichment in that the work group itself decides details ofproduction and work group norms to a much larger extent than the former job-restructuring schemes. Such teams can have autonomy, concerning taskallocation and scheduling, monitoring of attendance, health and safety issues,the flow and pace of production and can also be responsible for settingimprovement targets (Wall and Martin, 1987). Teams can also haveresponsibility for the recruitment and training of temporary staff as well ascontrolling overtime levels. Developing a cell-base team structure is seen ashelping communication, acceptance of change, and through peer pressurereduces the need for tight supervision and other forms of external control. Thisthen facilitates delayering. Such groups can have what psychologists term skilldiscretion (solving problems with the knowledge of the group) and meansdiscretion (choice in organising the means and tools of work) (Cooper, 1973), butare still working within a structure determined by senior management andremain focused on operational rather than strategic issues.

Attitudinal shapingThis sees empowerment as a psychological process and is often seen in theservice industry (Jones et al., 1997). There may be no change in work ororganisational structure but employees are trained/educated to feel empowered(a state of mind) and play a more confident role in their interaction with thecustomer. Internalisation of the new values is seen as the key to new behaviour.Such initiatives have been criticised as “smile campaigns” with critics arguingthat the end result is a better apology than improved service.

Indeed there is some research that suggests that changing attitudes througheducation and programmatic change is to misunderstand the process of change.It is changed behaviour that leads to changed attitudes rather than the reverse.What matters is how management organise work so as to ensure newresponsibilities, relationships and roles, which in turn forces changedbehaviour (Beer et al., 1990).

Self-managementThis tends to be fairly rare in any real sense. Clearly self-managing workgroups are a limited form of this approach, but are constrained by workingwithin certain limits set by senior management (e.g. self-managing in relation to

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a set of work tasks). Ideally self-management should involve divisions betweenmanagers and workers being eroded and decisions, rules and executiveauthority no longer set by the few for the many (Semler, 1989). Others havereferred to high involvement (Bowen and Lawler, 1992) where businessinformation is shared and employees have participation in wider businessdecisions.

Clearly these types may overlap as many initiatives incorporate several ofthese dimensions. For example, information is important to empowerment ingeneral and not just as a separate form. Similarly, a change in attitude and self-efficacy is seen by some writers as at the core of any form of empowerment(Conger and Kanungo, 1988).

DiscussionThere has been considerable criticism of the transformation thesis implying ashift from Fordism to Post-Fordism. It has been pointed out that the pursuit offlexibility has not led to widespread multiskilling and indeed reflects sectoralchange and opportunism rather than strategic choice (Legge, 1995). Leanproduction as implemented has strong elements of continuity with Taylorism.Nor have high trust relations appeared to be any more widespread than inprevious times, with commitment largely calculative. Thus the rosy picture ofan everyone wins scenario is hard to reconcile with much of what is reported tohave been happening in the real world where downsizing, work intensificationand career truncation appear to have been prevalent.

Effectiveness can be examined from a number of perspectives, and muchdepends on how one sees management motivation for the introduction of suchinitiatives. While there has been much discussion of empowerment from ahumanist perspective, there is no doubt that in the 1980s and 1990smanagement have regarded business considerations as the primary forcebehind empowerment. Thus the empowerment agenda of the 1980s and 1990sis much more pragmatic and business-oriented than the QWL movement of the1970s. Furthermore, management have defined the redistribution of power invery narrow terms. The degree of participation offered by empowerment isstrictly within an agenda set by management and it tends not to extend tosignificant power sharing or participation in higher level strategic decisionssuch as product and investment plans. It tends to be within systems rather thanover systems. It is also true to say that radical forms of empowerment are noton the current empowerment agenda. While there have been business benefitsarising from empowerment, it is often difficult to disentangle the contribution ofempowerment, given that it is typically part of a wider organisational changeprocess (TQM, BPR, etc.) with other changes such as new payment systems andnew technology often part of the package. In terms of whether it leads togreater worker influence the answer appears to be yes but within heavilyconstrained terms (Edwards et al., 1997; Rees, 1996; Wilkinson et al., 1997a;1997b).

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The rhetoric of senior management, and the names given to theirempowerment initiatives, sound superficially similar when comparingorganisations. Research suggests the need to move away from any simplistic orunilinear conceptions of empowerment (Lashley, 1997). Not only is it the casethat varying types of empowerment carry different meanings, but alsotechniques with the same name, structure and processes may be experienced invery different fashions by different workforces. As a result empowermentinitiatives cannot be analysed in isolation from the other organisation policiesthat impact on the employment relationship. In particular, attention must bedirected towards the work organisation, the nature of the workforce, existingtechnology and business strategy, and whether initiatives are designed tocreate the climate in which changes in these areas can be introduced or whetherthey are merely bolted-on in a context where wider changes are already underway. While the catalyst for the introduction empowerment initiatives may havebeen the same at the most general level, i.e. intensifying competitive pressure,the extent of these pressures may differ. In one organisation empowerment maybe part of a wider move to a more progressive and open style of management,while in another management may be forced towards changes in workorganisation and empowerment as part of an immediate and desperate struggleto survive, with increased intensification and management by stress (Parkerand Slaughter, 1993) the outcome, and workers putting up with the new regimebecause of a fear of dismissal. In short one needs to analyse the real terrain onwhich the empowerment initiative is operationalised.

However, the credibility and acceptance of any initiative is partly governedby the management’s treatment of the workforce. Studies point to theimportance of supporting changes in human resource policy such as movestowards single status in producing a conception among the workforce of anopen management style and helping to produce a more positive evaluation ofmanagement. Research on high performance work teams which encompassempowerment identifies the context within which the teams operated as criticalto their success. Management had a clear vision of how the teams fitted in withthe broader business strategy and this was shared with all employees.Moreover, the teams were supported by a whole raft of other initiatives such asan open management style, open plan layout, flexitime and the removal ofclocking and a payment system based on skills acquisition (Buchanan, 1994).Thus empowerment needs to be nurtured by the whole work environmentwithin which it operates. Teamworking is unlikely, for example, to be verysuccessful with an individualised payment system which cuts across the groupideal. While there is little evidence that traditional distrust is eliminated byempowerment there may be greater loyalty within the reconstructedworkgroups which may equally serve management goals. Similarly, bestpractice theory implies that inter-related elements produced benefits not apiecemeal approach. Key human resource practices included empowerment butalso identified training, rigorous selection, employee ownership andperformance-related reward as critical success factors (Pfeffer, 1994).

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Research is often polarised into those who report greater work effort andmore demanding jobs and those who report more job satisfaction, but there isevidence of both occurring simultaneously. Thus work could be more satisfyingwith increased discretion over the work process but demands may also be moreexplicit and rigorous. While traditional external controls such as supervisoryattention may have been eradicated, sophisticated measurement systems(technical control) monitor the performance of individuals and teams and peerpressure (social control) also serves management’s objectives. From thisperspective empowerment is more significant as ideology than as practice(Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992).

It is important to see empowerment in a wider context and reiterate thatempowerment as defined by employers is largely task-based and aimed atoperational issues. It is taken for granted in much of the prescriptive literaturethat employees will welcome and indeed be committed to the new approach.Indeed there is evidence that workers welcome the removal of irritants (e.g.close supervision) and welcome the opportunity to address problems at sourceas well as the ability to decide work allocation. However, there is also evidencethat employees are not sufficiently trained for empowerment in the Westespecially where empowerment is a result of downsizing. Empowermentbecomes abandonment (Adler, 1993). In contrast in Japan the success of jobenrichment has been attributed to newly hired workers being trained to do allthe jobs on the line (a process taking six to 12 months), so they understand theentire process and are better able to identify problems (Garvin, 1988). Anothercommon problem is that the decision-making process is not clear or developed,so that workers suggest ideas but management are unable to respondadequately to these. These problems are partly the result of the need to adapt tonew production techniques and downsizing rather than enhancingempowerment per se. In other words empowerment is not without costs both interms of establishing a new approach to management (involving training costs,costs of new reward and information systems) and in its operation (involvingissues of integration, consistency and unintended consequences) (Lawler, 1996).Thus the new paradigm of work organisation remains an ideal, with elementsadopted but in an ad hoc piecemeal manner. Some commentators havesuggested that employees’ empowerment is making someone else take the riskand responsibility (Sisson, 1994, p. 15) previously held by others without acommensurate improvement in their own terms and conditions.

However, the evidence indicates that employees are not cultural dopes (Hill,1995, p. 50) and do not simply buy into rhetoric in an unconditional way. Theirsupport is dependent on trust in management and the perceived benefits tothemselves. Employees interpret, evaluate and (re)act towards managerialinitiatives, and in its way serve to audit in their own way the viability ofmanagerial initiatives. Thus, while workers’ representatives may be becomingenmeshed in a management discourse which makes it difficult for them tochallenge any management strategy which is grounded in business logic, inreality they may oppose the initiative implemented and indeed may subvert

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management goals (Roberts and Wilkinson, 1991). Thus it could be argued that,although management try to limit empowerment, employees themselves maysee the discourse as a resource in their struggles with management to bringmanagers into line with workforce expectations (Rosenthal et al., 1997) andindeed may question the extent to which they are treated and rewarded in theorganisation as a whole, and the extent to which they participate in keybusiness decisions and hence construct their own agenda (Wilkinson et al.,1997a).

Because a passive view of the workforce is often taken, the potentialvariability of understanding of individual initiatives consequent on diversity ofindustrial sectors is often overlooked. Thus, for example in the services sector,moves towards empowerment may be seen by individual workforces as routinein the context of other firms already providing such schemes; in manufacturingthe situations may be very different. Indeed the differences between the sectorssuggest that the views expressed by the workforce towards empowermentinitiatives is not just a matter of degree; rather, the specific nature ofemployment relationships in the different sectors serves to indicate whether ornot such initiatives will involve immediate questions about the frontier ofcontrol. The importance of such initiatives lies in the context of the translationof their supposed formal properties within the real terrain of the organisationand workplace (Roberts and Wilkinson, 1991, pp. 408-09). Such a perspectivehelps us to understand whether empowerment erodes other forms ofinvolvement or participation. By restructuring work responsibilities andmaking the team central to the workplace, as well as encouraging employees toidentify with managerial objectives, it can marginalise unions and in somecases is clearly intended to do so. From a business perspective a concern inrecent years is the implication in terms of a loss of management control. Anindividual acting alone brought down a British Bank, Barings, and in otherorganisations such as Sears Roebuck, embarrassing headlines resulted fromemployees using their initiative and subverting control mechanisms (Simons,1995).

The prescriptive empowerment literature suggests that the role of middlemanagers and supervisors changes from holders of expert power to facilitators(or coaches). However, removal of expert power is often perceived as asignificant threat and participative management is seen as a burden to manymiddle managers and it is not surprising that they do not universally welcomeit (Denham et al., 1997; Marchington et al., 1992). Their sense of anxiety isexacerbated by fears of job loss as levels in the hierarchy may be reduced aspart of wider changes, as well as possible reduction in status and increasingworkload (Klein, 1984). Moreover some see moves towards employeeempowerment as soft management removing their authority over subordinates.However, research suggests that opposition may owe more to the fact that theywere not provided with the resources required, were not sufficiently trained orwere not evaluated on this in terms of performance appraisal and therefore didnot see it as of much importance (Marchington et al., 1992) and that the problem

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relates to systems and structures rather than the personnel of middlemanagement (Edwards et al., 1997). In other cases middle managers may feelthat they themselves gain influence over decisions taken elsewhere in theorganisation that affect their work. Some may also feel that it gives them achance to show their initiative and so increase their career prospects despitelosing a degree of functional expert power.

In practice empowerment can be seen as depending contingently on otherfactors. For lower level employees, empowerment in organisations with moreflexibly specialised processes, which rely on employee skill, discretion andorganisational capabilities, is more likely to be associated with more influenceover decisions than in organisations where there are routinised andstandardised processes that are capable of being tightly controlled from aboveand where there is a tradition of such control. Empowerment in terms ofidentifying and solving problems can be found in the latter environment, as wasevident at the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) – GM – Toyotajoint venture in California, a Taylorised auto plant, but the scope for radicalempowerment appears to be limited (Adler, 1993). There is also clearly aparadox in the empowerment process in that, while workers may be empoweredto improve a process, once that change has been made it is standardised andhence constraining.

ConclusionEmpowerment has arisen from the employee involvement initiatives of the1980s and has been conceived in an era where notions of industrial democracywere seen as old-fashioned. Empowerment has largely been aimed at shopfloorworkers with the twin goals of increasing productivity and commitment toemployers’ goals. While there has developed a variety of forms ofempowerment they share a common basis in being managerially driven andhence within an agenda which allows for largely task-based empowerment.However, it needs to be recognised that empowerment has different forms andshould be analysed in the context of broader organisational practice. Theimportance of these initiatives is in the context of the translation of theirsupposedly formal properties within the real terrain of the workplace.Empowerment may not in practice dilute overall management control: rather itcan reconstitute the nature of such control. This does not mean thatempowerment is without benefits to employees. Nor while these benefits maybe limited should they be dismissed as simply small beer. A pragmaticapproach needs to be taken. As Pfeffer (1994, p. 206) suggests with one shouldcompare programmes not with some ideal but with the situation that wouldexist in their absence. In other words, just because a programme does not solveevery problem or move the organisation all the way, particularly initially, towhere it wants and needs to be does not mean that it is a failure. A programmefails when it produces either no sustained change or else change that isdysfunctional and ineffective. Some remediation of problems in managing theemployment relation is certainly better than nothing at all. Research should

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move to examining the conditions under which empowerment is most effectiveand employee commitment to such schemes is enhanced.

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