Organizational Behavior: Empowerment

Leader’s perspective on how empowerment affects employees’ creativity and motivation.

To start with, empowerment benefits a lot on employees’ creativity and motivation. First, an empowering leader is more likely to help the employees to understand their significance and contribution to the organization. [2] An empowering leader expresses confidence in employees’ capability of accomplishing the work and prospects of high performance. Hence, the sense of confidence influences the employee so that they will be more confident and more likely to speak out when they come up with some innovative ideas. Meanwhile this promotes employees’ intrinsic motivation as they realize that they are free to speak out idea without any potential negative impact, so they will get more involved into the job and more likely bring creative outcomes. This is paramount important for a modern organization to be successful as class differentiation easily occur in multi-layered organizations. Because using the empowerment strategy, Ensoniq Corp. [3] boosts their managers’ performance and beat its business rival. Its market share finally increased by 3 to 4 percentage points.

Second, [2] empowering leader provides employees with greater autonomy on decision making. As creating an “impact” is one of important cognition of empowerment process, empowerment given by leader renders more opportunities for employee to make big decision so to give a feeling that employees’ contribution and decision on the work can really make a difference in the task, thus creating the “impact”. Instead of following direct orders and ideas of supervisors, employee follow their own thought to achieve a task can acquire more self-actualization, that “impact” created lead more motivation and willingness to continue the work.

To empower manager (leader), Leadership-Leadership exchange [1]LLX involves quality exchange of material (money and goods) and socioemotional resources (autonomy in work, emotional needs and...