UNIT – I Lesson 1 HRM – AN OVERVIEW Lesson Outline Nature of ...

3.19 Personnel Empowerment
Empowerment is recognizing and releasing into the organization and the power that
people already have in their wealth of useful knowledge and internal motivation.
Understanding the concept of power is a prerequisite to the comprehension of the contours
of empowerment. Primarily, the term ‘Power’ refers to an individual's capacity to
influence the behavior and attitudes of others. This usually also results in the ability to
influence events, decisions and possessions. It can be used productively or destructively.
Empowerment means giving or restoring a person or group more power. Oxford
Dictionary describes the word empower to mean endowing with the ability or power
required for a purpose or task. Empowerment could be facilitated by providing people the
access to information and resources and ability to share their views to impact their own as
well as organization’s future.
Only the people, through education, coalition building, community organizing,
resource development, or advocacy assistance, might be able to achieve empowerment for
themselves. A mediator, who can work with the lower power person or group to help them
represent themselves more effectively, can also achieve it. The word empowerment also
refers to authorization and permission to operate on one’s own accord to a reasonable
extent in certain situations without having to get approval from anyone else. It is
sometimes described that empowerment seeks to restore in employees a sense of their own
value and strength and their own capacity to handle life's problems. Management writer
Tom Peters considered empowerment as a necessary condition to improve zest, creativity
and automatic symbiosis with the customers. Empowerment involves giving employees a
greater degree of control in organizational operations through management’s participation.
Personnel Empowerment is a trust-based relationship. It can be described as a way
of working together that is fundamentally different from the traditional notion of top-down
command and external control. It is a condition that entails vesting greater degrees of selfdetermination,
responsibility and trust in all employees so as to support and liberate people
rather than diminish their range of thought and action. Paradoxically, in an empowered
workplace, people tend to feel both freedom and self-control. Thus, empowerment leads to
a situation in which employees’ commitment and engagement would be released to such
an extent that ordinary personnel achieve extraordinary performance.