gender differential paper IJCRB

ijcrb.webs.com
JUNE 2011
INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN BUSINESS VOL 3, NO 2
most people refer to employee empowerment they do not only mean delegation but it is more
than that and that is the reason that there are a numerous studies which has defined
empowerment in different aspects.
Some of these definitions are vague and meant to be so. (Block, 1987) describes empowerment
as "a state of mind as well as a result of position, policies, and practices”.
2. OBJECTIVES
The objective of this study was to answer the following questions.
How does empowerment relate to the job satisfaction of the employees?
How does empowerment relate to the commitment of the employees with the
organization?
How does satisfaction of employees regarding to their jobs relate to the commitment of
employees with the organization?
The purpose of this study was to highlight the relationship between Employee Empowerment,
Job satisfaction, and Employee’s Commitment with the organization. The findings will provide
the management of the organizations the direction to understand the balance of performance
elements with employees and trust their employees by empowering them to make them satisfied
and committed and to help the organization as well.
3. LITERATURE REVIEW
In this section, literature review on Employee Empowerment and Job Satisfaction is discussed.
The researches done by different researchers and models are described.
3.1 Employee Empowerment:
Creating a working environment where employees are allowed to make decisions on their own
regarding specific work related situations is employee empowerment. The decisions taken by
employees could be small or large and the effects of those decisions is depend upon the employer
that how much authority he has given to the employee.
Every organization has its own way to describe and implement empowerment according to its
usefulness and scope in practice. Even though it is very difficult to assign an exact definition to
empowerment but a few more definitions are:
Empowerment means giving people their head. It means that the management is delegating the
authority to the employees while commanding less (Rock, 1994). In management point of view,
empowerment is “giving up some control to the employees and sharing information regarding
company goals and achievements of the employees, its acceptance of risk by taking more
responsibility” (Lorette, 1991). “When employees are encouraged to take decisions and initiate
actions with less control and direction from their manager then that means they are empowered
by their manager” (Handy, 1993). Empowerment is a process in which the feelings of self
efficacy are enhanced in the employees of the organization by identifying the conditions which
promotes powerlessness and by removing those conditions by formal organizational practices
and informal techniques of providing effective information throughout the organization (Conger
& Kanungo, 1988). For the purpose of this thesis study, the definition of empowerment which
was given by Conger and Kanungo will be taken as the basic definition.
The concept of employee empowerment is not fairly used when it is compared with the size of
employee population and it can also be easily misconstrued by the organization as every
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