Empowerment has become a widely used management term in the last decade or so, though,
in practical terms, it shares the ambiguity of its predecessors in the HRM tradition. This paper
sets out to unravel the web of meaning surrounding empowerment to show what a contested
concept it is, and hence why its application in organizational settings is fraught with
misunderstanding and tension. It does so by taking an approach that contributes to the
examination of HRM discourse and management rhetoric. To demonstrate the ambiguity of
empowerment as a concept, the paper reviews the various ways in which the term has been
used across non-management disciplines (women, minority groups, education, community
care, politics), culminating with a review of the use of empowerment in contemporary
management theory. The paper concludes that organizations and managers have chosen to
coin a phrase which is open to different, sometimes contradictory,meanings and which, when
applied, evokes both subjective attitudes and objective behaviour, means different things in
varying contexts, and is affected fundamentally by individual differences in perception and
experience. Unless organizations offer clear operational definitions when using empowerment,
instead of purely acquiescing to a vague and seductive version of the concept, they are
abdicating responsibility for the unpredictable consequences that result.