In your blog, prepare a summary that compares and contrasts the concepts discussed to those discussed in the text
After all of my readings this week, I find the implementation of empowerment to be a tricky and complex proposal for any organization. What I've come to learn is that a company or organization will first have to determine a few things prior to empowering the employees. These factors include control constraints, boundary limits, and the delegation of management roles. When a company is ready to decide whether or not they want to empower their employees, they need to carefully understand the workforce and understand how each level of workers will handle the opportunity. Will the employees know what to do with power, will they know how to properly take on more work, and will they rise to the occasion of using the new power?
Comparing the two readings - In out book reading this week, it states, "they (the workers) possess the capability and competence to preform a task successfully. Empowered people not only feel competent, they feel confident" (Cameron and Whetten, 2011). I interpret this to mean that when a company is looking to transition to a new management plan, they need to make sure that the lower level work forces are ready to take on responsibility, do to the fact that some middle managers may loose their jobs. Sometimes, the workforce is not capable or wanting of that extra work. In the supplemental reading, the author states "a transfer of power from those who had it and those who had less of it. Power was seen as a commodity whose currency could be acquired (Forrester, 2000). In this interpretation, power is something that lower level employees wanted to gain from those above them. In my understanding however, sometimes those lower level people do NOT want extra duties and if the company is not careful, they could ruin their implementation of empowerment by forcing it into use to early. Both sources this week hinted at the carefulness that an organization might need to heed in this process.
Differences - I found that in the (Cameron and Whetten) reading, they focus on articulating goals and sharing information with employees and enabling them through trust and strategy. In the Forrester article, I found that there was more of an emphasis on physiological concepts and implementation inputs and hazards. Our book reading looked into the ability to utilize empowerment as a tool and how we can use it and the article focused on the "how to" get this done and examples of how companies succeeded or failed using the empowerment techniques. One downside I personally noted from the Forrester article was "Empowerment is deployed selectively, segmenting the workforce into those who are empowered to use their brainpower and creatively to solve problems and those who are not. Such deployment is destructive and virtually guarantees failure" (Forrester, 2000).
I understand that there is a level of care when implementing change, especially empowerment activities into a company. There has to be a clear idea, a workforce who is willing to change and a certain level of trust and direction from the upper management level. The failure to carefully understand your businesses goals and workforce could lead to a failure in successfully changing your open door policy and empowering employees. This week I personally learned that sometimes changing to quickly and for the wrong reasons can lead to un-beneficial outcomes and misdirection in management. I now know that I need to propose change based on the knowledge that my workforce trusts me, we have a clear direction, and we have the ability (internally) to do so.
Whetten, C. & Cameron, K. (2011). Developing Management Skills (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
Forrester, R. (2000, January 1). Empowerment: Rejuvenating a potent idea. Retrieved September 11, 2014, from http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4165660?uid=3739976&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21104154496521
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