Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior - Soltanieh ...

202 JAY A. CONGER AND CRAIG L. PEARCE
THE EMPOWERMENT PROCESS
The actual process of empowerment can be viewed along six stages that include the psychological
state of an empowering experience, its antecedent conditions, and its behav ioral
consequences. The six stages are shown in Figure 11.1 . The first stage is the diagnosis of
conditions within individuals and their organizations that are responsible for feelings of
disempowerment. Following the diagnosis of disempowerment, managers may employ certain
strategies indicated in stage 2. The employment of these strategies is aimed at not only
removing some of the conditions responsible for disempowerment; but also (and more importantly)
at providing subordinates with empowerment information for stage 3. Individuals then
interpret this information in stage 4 according to personal styles of assessment. If these styles
assess the information as empowering, then an individual will feel empowered and the behavioral
effects of empowerment will be observed in stage 5, where individuals become effective
self - leaders (Manz and Sims, 1980 ). Beyond these five stages for the individual, empowerment
can spread among group members and lead to group empowerment, whose result is the display
of shared leadership in stage 6 (Bligh, Pearce, and Kohles, 2006 ).
Stage 1
Starting with the first stage (the context), there are specific individual and contextual factors
that contribute to the lowering of empowerment feelings among organizational mem bers
(Block, 1987 ; Conger, 1989 ; Kanter, 1979 , 1983 ; Thomas and Velthouse, 1990 ). From the
standpoint of organizational factors, Table 11.1 identifies some of the principal factors that
influence and hinder empowerment outcomes. These are organized into four categories:
(a) organizational, (b) hierarchical leader behavior, (c) reward systems, and (d) job design.
Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4 Stage 5 Stage 6
Conditions Using Enhancing Interpreting Leading to Resulting in
leading to a managerial self-efficacy information individual group level
psychological empowerment as either behavioral empowerment
state of strategies and empowering effects of
disempowerment techniques or not empowerment
Organizational
factors
Hierarchical
leader
behavior
Reward system
Supportive
organizational
culture
Training
and
development
Enactive
attainment
Vicarious
experience
Verbal
persuasion
Dispositional
effects on
interpretation
of events –
different
people will
interpret
events
Initiation of
self-leadership
practices on the
part of
individuals
Development
of shared
leadership
across the
organization
Job design
Involvement
in goal setting
Job enrichment
Emotional
arousal
differently
Selection
FIGURE 11.1 Stages of the empowerment process
Source: Adapted from Conger and Kanungo (1988)