Hello everyone, today we are going to talk about empowerment. I broached this subject during my Master one internship and I thought it was very interesting. So today I am going to present you some definitions and conceptions of this word and later, based on some articles, we will see its effects.
In French, the word empowerment in an Anglicism used to talk about the power of acting. Some authors also said that the learning process can allow the emancipation and the independence of people. The notion of empowerment is used in a lot of domains such as feminism, some actions for the civil rights, etc., but today we are more precisely going to discuss this notion in the domain of work.
In this area, empowerment has been distinguished in three different categories.
First of all, there is the structural empowerment. It refers to the fact that the directors and the supervisors gives more authority and decision power to the subordinates. It also means that the subordinates can have a better access to resources. A lot of things can be considered a form of structural empowerment such as the participation of the employees to the decision making process or the realisation of their work. Even if it’s supposed to be motivating, it can also be a source of stress so it’s important to control the establishment of this measures.
Secondly, there is the psychological empowerment which refers to the ability and the motivation to act in our environment. Four dimensions constitute it : meaning, competence, self-determination and impact. At work, the meaning refers to the balance between the values of the work and those of the employee. The competence means that the employee can do his job efficiently. The self-determination concerns the belief that our actions are the result of our choices. And the impact is the capacity of a person to influence their environment.
Finally, there is the behavioural empowerment, which is associated with the implication of the employee in their tasks. It’s expressed by the implication of a person in the efficiency of their group and of their organization.
A lot of studies were made about the effects of empowerment and programs of formation to empowerment. Firstly, we can mention the study of Dahinten et al., (2014). Their goal was to compare the perceptions of the staff whose leaders participated in a year-long leadership program, with the staff of similar leaders who did not attend the program. The result showed that the leaders’ participation in the program was directly associated with greater staff organizational commitment one year after the program.
Another study, from Chang et al., (2008), observed the effects of an empowerment-based education program on public health nurses. The results showed a significant effect of the program on psychological empowerment and subscales of competence and impact, innovative behaviour and job productivity.
Spence Laschinger et al., (2012) also studied this thematic on nurses. The results of the formation showed a significant effect of the intervention on the access to support and empowerment structures, total empowerment, supervisor incivility, and trust in management.
So, we can say that the benefits of empowerment are numerous, however, there are not a lot of studies on this subject and they mainly focus on health jobs. In my opinion, this subject should be detailed and studied with different types of jobs.
Bibliography :
Boudrias, J.-S. (2016). Habilitation (empowerment). Dunod. https://www.cairn.info/psychologie-du-travail-et-des-organisations–9782100738113-page-224.htm
Chang, L.-C., Liu, C.-H., & Yen, E. H.-W. (2008). Effects of an empowerment-based education program for public health nurses in Taiwan. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 17(20), 27822790. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2702.2008.02387.x
Dahinten, V. S., Macphee, M., Hejazi, S., Laschinger, H., Kazanjian, M., McCutcheon, A., Skelton-Green, J., & O’Brien-Pallas, L. (2014). Testing the effects of an empowerment-based leadership development programme : Part 2 – staff outcomes. Journal of Nursing Management, 22(1), 1628. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12059
MacPhee, M., Dahinten, V. S., Hejazi, S., Laschinger, H., Kazanjian, A., McCutcheon, A., Skelton-Green, J., & O’Brien-Pallas, L. (2014). Testing the effects of an empowerment-based leadership development programme : Part 1 – leader outcomes. Journal of Nursing Management, 22(1), 415. https://doi.org/10.1111/jonm.12053
Spence Laschinger, H. K., Leiter, M. P., Day, A., Gilin-Oore, D., & Mackinnon, S. P. (2012). Building empowering work environments that foster civility and organizational trust : Testing an intervention. Nursing Research, 61(5), 316325. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNR.0b013e318265a58d