Replying to LO26136 --
In my view 'empowerment' is a broad abstraction, and therefore has no
operational meaning outside a specific context in which it is used.
Participation is understood in the details of change and the operational
day to day reality of a worker's experience of decision making and being
heard. If managers starts talking about 'empowerment', then at first each
employee will construct their own understanding of what that abstraction
means. They will each refine that construct in the light of what changes
they actually experience - or rather, they will come to build a construct
of what they think their employer or manager functionally means by
'empowerment', and will measure that against their own construct, thereby
becoming engaged or alienated according to their assessment of two gaps -
the gap between what they think the word means and what their manager
thinks the word means; and the gap between what their managers says
empowerment means and the actual operational meaning revealed by their day
to day performance.
My guess is that Peggy's experience in her own organisation is a
consequence of a failure to acknowledge or deal with the diverse ways of
understanding the abstraction. Or else it is indicative of a transitional
phase in a well managed process.
But it gets more complex. The diversity of view exists only because the
idea is not an absolute. One is not either 'empowered' or 'not empowered'.
It is a continuum. Peggy lays this point out clearly in her post.
It seems to me that the operationalisation of degrees of empowerment are
not primarily a function of structure or formal lines of authority and
accountability or of training. They are a function of the extent to which:
(a) people have easy access to all the information they need to do their
job, when they need it, in a form they can understand, in possession of
skills they need in order to understand it, and with the formal authority
to act on it (this last being the structural variable);
(b) people are invited (formally and informally) to give and receive
feedback on/from people performing functions other than their own
(including senior management), and the extent to which the organisation's
culture leads people to welcome such feedback (or otherwise);
which might be summed up as open information architecture and open
communications processes.
But there is an implication of appropriateness in my proposition. People
can operate filters if an open information architecture is based on
information pull more than it is on information push. Feedback will be
both pushed and pulled, but those who push feedback will have a good sense
of what is and is not appropriate feedback. This suggests that empowerment
includes the power to be self restrained and self controlled.
Finally it seems to me that an organisation will decide on the degree of
openness it will seek in its information architecture and communications
processes - and therefore the degree of empowerment it will make possible
- according to the extent that its particular context and strategic intent
focuses it more on risk management or on opportunity management. It seems
to me that contradictions and tensions are much more likely to become
magnified when an organisation espouses empowerment strategies alongside a
strong risk management instinct. I would suggest that when that happens it
is usually because 'empowerment' is being pursued as an ill-understood
management fad rather than out of any fundamental set of strategic
principles.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
www.webresearch.co.nz
>I had the opportunity to ask about 1/2 of my organisation what they
>thought it meant to be "empowered", have "autonomy" and to "collaborate".
>And I heard some really interesting and diverse definitions.
--"Phillip Capper" <phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz>
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