The lives of managers and their workers are getting more complex in today’s business environment. Empowering supervisors who give employees room to think and to behave independently are often perceived as more effective than those who traditionally bark out specific orders. Here the two management styles face off.

Managing a team is a very challenging task, no doubt about it. Though the overall direction of the group is set, making a team out of the group is very difficult. Dysfunctions can occur at different levels, and the style of leadership is one of balance: enable your employees to work independently enough that they can be creative in doing their work, but not giving so much free reign as they behave without any accountability to authority.

Dictators — a word that has long been considered a profanity in the Western world — tell people what to do, when to do it, and how. Empowered people decide those things themselves.

Empowerment can be defined as the process of enabling (or authorizing) an individual to think, behave, act and control work and decision making in autonomous ways. It is not an implementation, and it is only partly a strategy. Rather, it is a philosophy; it is the state of feeling self-empowered to take control of one’s own future and fostering a culture wherein this state can thrive.

For an organization to practice and foster employee empowerment, management must trust and communicate with employees. Employee communication is one of the strongest signs of employee empowerment: from constant, honest communication regarding the strategic plan and financial requirements and performance, down to daily decision making.

Take former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, for instance. Welch believed in creating an open, collaborative workplace wherein everyone’s opinion was welcome. In a letter to shareholders, he wrote the following:

If you want to get the benefit of everything employees have, you’ve got to free them — make everybody a participant. Everybody has to know everything, so they can make the right decisions by themselves.

Although empowerment may be the state of people in organizations having the resources, the skills and the authority to make a decision or take an action, and being accountable for the results of what they decide or do, somebody still has to give them the authority, sanction their power and let them decide or do something.

People inherently want control of their careers, their lives, to think independently, to have the ability and authorization to think for themselves. Most managers and employees say they want empowerment, as empowered employees grow their skills and the organization benefits. When encouraged with care, empowerment can be a panacea for many organization ills.

Then again, empowerment can work against the company or division of a company, too.

For instance, staff members may be empowered without direction. “Failure to provide a strategic framework, in which decisions have a compass and success measurements, imperils the opportunity for empowered behavior,” writes Susan Heathfield, a management and organization development consultant. Paradoxically, employees need direction to know how to practice empowerment.

Moreover, while most people want access to significant information and responsibility, as well as the opportunity to make decisions or at least have a say in the decision making process, they do not want to be taken advantage of. Although this should be common sense, “when employees feel under-compensated, under-titled for the responsibilities they take on, under-noticed, under-praised and under-appreciated, don’t expect results from employee empowerment,” notes Heathfield.

If management does not create the environment that fosters employee empowerment, and if employees do not accept the opportunity and demonstrate they are willing and capable, then employee empowerment becomes a management cop out in which the only thing employees get out of it is “the liability, negative consequences and misery” of what one IMT reader last fall called “blame management.”

Even further, though, there is the thought process that actually goes against the empowerment managerial style. This belief, argued by Dr. Keith M. Hmieleski and Dr. Michael D. Ensley, says that command-style leadership can be more effective than empowering leaders who give their employees room to think and behave independently in certain environments. This is especially true in environments such as fast-moving entrepreneurial businesses, the researchers say.

Hmieleski, assistant professor of management at the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, and his co-researcher from Rensselaer Polytech Institute’s Lally School of Management & Technology in Troy, NY, claimed in a study last October that the benefits of directive leadership and the drawbacks of empowering leadership have been downplayed.

Hmieleski acknowledges the increasingly held conventional wisdom that companies with empowering leaders possess the competitive advantages of flexibility, innovation and creativity. Directive leaders — those who instruct people to carry out designated tasks and reprimand those who stray — are seen as old-fashioned and possibly downright stifling.

But the reality, he says, is not that simple. Leadership is contextual and highly complex, and both styles of leadership have pros and cons depending on the internal team variables and the external variable of industry dynamism. “A directive leader can rapidly clarify what work needs to be done in the moment and by whom.”

The truth is that there probably is no one management-style solution that works universally, particularly in large companies where the variety of conditions makes things more complex. Is it possible for an organization to be an empowered dictatorship?

Earlier: Employee Empowerment: Eliminate ‘Us Versus Them’

Resources

Top Ten Ways to Make Employee Empowerment Fail
by Susan M. Heathfield
About: Human Resources

Empowering Leaders Not Always Best for New Business Ventures
Newswise, Oct. 15, 2006

“A Contextual Examination of New Venture Performance: Entrepreneur Leadership Behavior, Top Management Team Heterogeneity and Environmental Dynamism”
The Journal of Organizational Behavior