Workplace Empowerment

In the post liberalization phase, organizations are concerned about achieving excellence and attaining the numero uno position. One of the initiatives that enable them to become the best is emphasis on employee-oriented strategies. Employee empowerment is one such strategy in achieving excellence. Empowerment is not only about providing the employees with the best of work processes, infrastructure and support systems but also to instill in them a feeling of 'can do' which leads to the experience of empowerment. In the present book, an effort is made not only to study the impact of support systems on employee and organizational effectiveness but also what leads to the experience of psychological empowerment and its relationship with organizational and managerial effectiveness. The book is structured into nine chapters. In the first two chapters, the variables under study are introduced and conceptually and historically built into a theoretical model. Empowerment is linked to leadership, organization structure and effectiveness. Each of these concepts is theoretically built up to arrive at a model. Chapter Three discusses in detail the pilot study conducted, the need for the pilot study and its findings. Chapter Four and Five discuss the objectives, hypotheses generated, operational definitions, method and procedure adopted in the study. Chapters Six and Seven discuss the statistical analysis, results and discussion on the main findings. Chapter Eight talks about the implications and future scope of the study. Chapter Nine focuses on practice of empowerment in some of the Indian organizations. The book will be beneficial for the students of B-schools, researchers, academicians, and industry practitioners wanting to initiate change and design interventions.