Empowerment is often discussed as a new managerial approach these days. Although a lot of managers have recently paid attention to empowerment in organizations, conceptual or empirical research of empowerment has been limited in terms of depth and scope. In this study, a conceptual framework for empowerment process is developed, integrating previous management and psychology literature, and tested empirically.
It is asserted that empowerment be distinguished from authority delegation, self-efficacy, motivation, or ownership and be focused on the psychological states of subordinates through the conceptual discussion of empowerment in organizations. In this study, competence, self-determination, impact, and meaningfulness are discussed as four dimensions of empowerment. Many factors affecting empowerment are considered, including locus of control, self-esteem, access to information, span of control, role ambiguity, job feedback, super leadership behaviors of superiors, LMX(Leader-Member eXchage quality), and participatory climate.
Five major hypotheses are developed and tested empirically, using self-reported data from 357 R&D researchers from 16 public and private research institutes. Factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, and multiple stepwise regression analysis, are employed to test the hypotheses.
The major findings of the study are as followings :
(1) Individual differences, job characteristics, and superior & department variables are shown to have significant relationships with empowerment.
(2) Empowerment has high correlation with job satisfaction, organization commitment, intention to turnover, and self-appraisal of subordinates.
(3) Educational level and the tenure of R&D researchers moderate the relationship between empowerment and its affecting factors.
(4) Multiple stepwise regression analysis reveals that implementation of participative management, educational program for enhancing self-esteem, and job redesign for increasing job feedback are needed for empowerment.
(5) It is shown that scores of team leaders in four dimensions of empowerment are higher than those of team members.
The implications of the findings and future research directions are discussed.