How the organization should be structured in order to empower its employees
Employees empowerment can be achieved where the organizational culture aims at generating a strong and healthy communication climate and where M&E processes are aimed at fostering organizational development and learning.
The previous sections looked at empowerment from the personal point of view: that of the leader and that of the follower. This section looks at empowerment from a structural perspective.
Empowerment as a philosophy of empowerment has implications for for organizational structures.
Specifically, it calls for organizations:
to be decentralized,
to share more information,
to have in place a system of contingent rewards,
to be team-based,
to align itself with its goals and values.
Such an organization will become an environment adequate for the development of an empowered workforce.
Individual empowerment cannot occur within a highly centralized system of control because such systems reserve decision-making power for the few who occupy the center, thus inhibiting individual initiative. Organizational learning is also inhibited because people are not motivated to learn when they don't have authority to do anything with what they have learned (Denzau & North, 1993). On the other hand, in a decentralized organization, decision-making power is distributed to the outer limits of the organization, "as close to the action as possible" (Handy, 1994, p. 135). In practical terms, this means giving employees the authority to make real-time decisions in the face of situations that fall outside the normal parameters of standard operating procedures.
The possession of knowledge and withholding it from others is a way to maintain a system of domination (Ford, 2006, p. 499). On the other hand, in an empowering organization, processes are in place that ensure a wide-spread sharing of information. To be empowered, employees need two kinds of information: (
1) information about the organization’s mission and goals;
2) information about their performance.
As information is more openly shared, the organization will begin to function less on the basis of opinion and bias and more on the basis of facts. Systems must be in place, therefore, that enable a wide spectrum of people access to both general information about the organization and also specific information about the performance of their particular department or team. See project/program communication management
A reward system that is aligned with the purpose of empowerment may be the most difficult aspects of organizational structure to design. From a structural perspective, it has been widely recognized that empowerment and a contingent reward system go hand-in-hand (Honold, 1997, p. 210). A contingent reward system is a system of rewards that distinguishes between employees based on performance. Bossidy and Charan (2002) refer to this as "differentiation" and call it "the mother's milk of building a performance culture" (p. 95). Empowering organizations reward employees who make decisions that contribute to the accomplishment of the organization's purpose and goals.
Care must be exercised to make sure that what is rewarded truly reflects the goal of organizational learning. A system that automatically punishes failure is likely to inhibit further "explorations" into the realm of empowered decision-making. In fact, the system may reward an employee simply for attempting a new idea, even if it failed.
Another structural implication is that empowering organizations accomplish their work through teams. When considered from a purely individualistic perspective, empowerment can become a zero-sum proposition where the increase in power by one individual necessitates the loss of power by another. When construed as a team effort, one can more easily visualize how the increase in power is shared by the many and that the increase in power by one means a generalized multiplication in power for the group.
From the perspective of the learning organization, learning also becomes a team effort as people learn to "think together" and to "diffuse their knowledge and skills from the levels of individuals to the members of the collective". The group becomes a body where the development of one member of the body increases the power of the body as a whole. In the organizational context, this means that employees become concerned not only with the success of their immediate responsibility, with also with the success of the other members of the team. (see guidelines: How to manage Teams ; How to recognise if Team Building is succesfull)
Life is full of paradoxes that often have to be balanced to avoid warped and potentially disastrous consequences. This is very true with regard to the topics of empowerment and alignment. Senge (2006) explains:
To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive. If people do not share a common vision, and do not share common mental models about the project/programme purpose reality within which they operate, empowering people will only increase organizational stress and the burden of management to maintain coherence and direction. . . . An organizational commitment to personal mastery [empowerment] would be naive and foolish if leaders in the organization lacked the capabilities of building shared vision and shared mental models to guide local decision makers (p. 136).
This is an important warning that highlights the delicate balance that must be maintained between autonomy, control, and coordination (Keidel, 1995). The organizational structure must ensure that processes, goals, structure, people, and reward systems are aligned with one another. This effort alone indicates that empowerment is necessarily limited by parameters defined for the organization, the team, and individual employees.
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Empowerment is a necessary element of organizational learning. It is also a prerequisite to an organization becoming a learning organization. learning organization"