Impact Of Employee Empowerment On Talent Retention

 

Dr. Chadaram Satyanarayana,

Director,

Yadavrao Tasgaonkar School Of Business Management,

Bhiwpuri Road, Karjat,

Maharastra, India.

 

Introduction:

An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personality succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success.

An organization’s human resource is its most valuable asset. The employees are the repository of knowledge, skills and abilities that can’t be imitated by the competitors. Technologies, products and processes are easily imitated by the competitors; however at the end of the day, employees are the most strategic resource of the company.

Generally, people are a firm’s most underutilized resource. And that is why management tries to empower the employees. But employees often are afraid of taking this responsibility. They fear that additional work pressure that they will have to bear as a part of being empowered. Besides, they also fear being held accountable for the decisions they make.

Empowered refers to enlargement of the employees job responsibility by giving him the authority of decision making about his own job without approval of his immediate supervisor. Empowerment is the degree of responsibility and authority given to an employee. By empowerment, the employees are supported and encouraged to utilize their skills, abilities and creativity by accepting accountability for their work. Empowerment occurs when employees are adequately trained, provided with all the relevant information and the best possible tools, fully involved in key decisions and are fairly rewarded.

Employee empowerment entails identifying how much responsibility and authority an individual can effectively handle without becoming over burdened or distressed. Empowerment includes supervisors and employees working together to establish clear goals and expectations within agreed upon boundaries.  

Psychological Empowerment:

The strategy of empowerment is not only attempting to extend the arguments of the excellence movement but also in seeking to solve the problems of alienation. Strategies of empowerment may include redefining the nature supervision of management, rewards system, job design, or even the nature of working environment. The critical determinant is the ability to take control of one’s own situation.

The perceived control over one’s situation has been termed as psychological empowerment.

Studies by Thomas and Velthouse (1990) have resulted in a cognitive model of empowerment. It determines the motivation of individual’s assessment of how high his or her feelings are. These assessments are positively related to the feelings of empowerment.

These are four sub variables are:

1. Impact
2. Competence
3. Meaning
4. Self determination

The lack of any single dimension will deplete though not completely eliminate the overall degree of felt empowerment. Thus the four dimensions specify a complete or sufficient set of cognitions for understanding empowerment.

Organic structure, organizational support assess to strategic information to attend organizational resources and organizational culture are identified as social, structural antecedents of psychological empowerment. Innovation, upward influencing and self managerial effectiveness are identified as the behavioral outcomes.   These affect the employee’s feelings of empowerment.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB):

It is an individual behavior that is discretionary, not directly or explicitly recognized by the formal reward system and that in the aggregate promotes the effective function of the organization.

OCB could be directed towards variety of foci like co-workers, supervisors, customers, etc.

When employees receive low empowerment in conjunction with perception of procedural justices or unfair treatment, they may be more likely to withdraw OCB than when the experience low inducements like employment alongside procedural and interactional justice.