Employee Empowerment - A UK Survey of Trends and Best Practices

It is becoming increasingly clear that the engine for organisational development is not analysts, but managers and people who do the work. Without altering human knowledge, skills, and behaviour, change in technology, processes, and structures is unlikely to yield long-term benefits. Managing business productivity has essentially become synonymous with managing change effectively. To manage change, companies must not only determine what to do and how to do it, they also need to be concerned with how employees will react to it [Cooper and Markus 1995][Reger et al., 1994]. In this respect, the role of Human Resource Management [HRM] is moving from the traditional command and control approach to a more strategic one [Oram and Wellins 1995][Cane 1996], and studies [Albert and Bradley, 1997]][Agarwal et al., 1998] have highlighted “employee empowerment” as one of its critical success elements. This paper introduces a study that aimed at identifying the current trends and best practices in employee empowerment by analysing case studies of pioneering organisations and validating the findings through a survey of leading UK organisations. The paper presents the findings of this survey and provides comments and a conclusion about the future directions in ‘empowerment’.