Well-being at work and performance: what role do empowering managerial practices play?
For many years in France, the business world has been undergoing many changes in the workplace. These work-related transformations manifest themselves through several socio-economic phenomena: globalization, economic crises, health crisis, inter-company competition, digitalization of practices, new forms of organization, etc. Most organizations require their employees to be even more efficient to increase their productivity, improve customer/patient satisfaction and thus gain a competitive advantage over their opponent (Migneault, 2006). The competitiveness of companies now depends on their ability to invest and place their trust in individual and collective intelligence, thus increasing efficiency and improving the quality of work. However, since the time of Taylorism, the vision of the individual at work has evolved significantly. Indeed, for their part, employees are looking for more meaning, recognition, and fulfilment at work. Therefore, psychological well-being appears to be essential for workers, but also for organizations since it is indirectly a vector of performance (Brahami & Nicolas, 2015). Guaranteeing employees’ well-being at work is today a major social, legal, and economic issue for organizations.
Therefore, organizations are invited to rethink and reinvent their managerial and organizational modes of operation to meet the emerging aspirations of workers. The questioning of managerial practices known as “command and control” (Taylorism model), as well as the search for increased performance, are leading to the emergence of new innovative practices. Finally, empowerment practices seem to be powerful levers for increasing the performance of organizations by guaranteeing the well-being of employees. The notion of empowerment emerges in reaction to the classical approaches with the Human Relations movement supported by authors such as Elton Mayo, Abraham Maslow, and Douglas McGregor.
In a linguistic point of view, empowerment can be divided in 3 terms:
- em: reports the movement to power
- power: signifying the power to act
- ment: means the presence a result linked to the increase in power
Finally, the notion of empowerment would be a movement enabling the acquisition of power in order to produce something or achieve a specific goal.
This approach focuses on the human factor and is interested in the relational, emotional, and motivational dimensions of the individual at work. The objective of the Human Relation approach is to enriches the nature of the employee’s work by giving their more autonomy and decision-making and thus, to provide a greater capacity for self-actualization (Mayo, 1933). As a result, we will later realize that management is one of the main levers of good organizational management (Plane, 2019). Several studies show that having greater work conditions lead to more psychological empowerment and more behavioural empowerment. Thanks to empowering managerial practices, employees are regaining a central place and are being given more decision-making power, recognition, and autonomy. Workers become the main resource enabling efficiency.
Finally, it is the all process of empowerment (organizational, then psychological, then behavioral empowerment) that will enable teams to be effective. In other words, it is by setting up working conditions that empower workers in the organization (organizational empowerment), by promoting a worker state of mind, to invested them with the capacity to act at work (psychological empowerment), and by implementing actions that designate an effective involvement of the person in the organization and management of their work (behavioral empowerment), that work teams will be perennial and efficient.
The new challenges for organizations now are to create empowering work conditions and to balance these notions to guarantee well-being at work and performance combined.
References
Brahami, L., & Nicolas, P. (2015). Bien-être au travail performance & économique : Le sens et la reconnaissance au coeur de la performance. DIRECCTE Rhône-Alpes. http://www.aractidf.org/sites/default/files/brochure_bien-etre_au_travail-direccte-rhone-alpes_0.pdf
Mayo, E. (1933). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (1st ed, Vol. 6). The Macmillan Company.
Migneault, P. (2006). Empowerment : Quelle est l’influence du climat psychologique sur l’habilitation psychologique et comportementale? Université de Montréal. Plane, J.-M. (2019). Management des organisations : Théories, concepts, performances. Dunod.