Organisational empowerment as a bun

Organisational empowerment as a bundle of HRM activities
Given the above considerations, organisational empowerment, as a managerial practice
of granting authority to one’s subordinates for executing their primary tasks, can be
placed under HRM practices, as it is proposed by Huselid et al. (1997). It is noteworthy
however that prior research typically studies organisational empowerment as an HRM
practice that refers to authority granting to employees, and its measures are limited to
the degree of decision-making power. We propose that organisational empowerment
should be viewed as a bundle of HRM activities rather than being measured merely
through the degree of decision-making power, as its implementation does not suffice
authority granting to subordinates. If we look into the meaning of the word “power”, we
will see that it has two underlying meanings - “authority to do something” and “ability to
make something happen” (Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, 2002).
Therefore to be truly empowered employees need both authority and guidance and skills
to make decisions that would normally be made by their supervisors. Nicholls (1995) and
Jones et al. (1997) also support the idea that empowerment necessitates certain employee
abilities and thus they should be provided careful coaching and training. Harley (1999,
p. 43) proposes that empowerment refers to the “delegation of responsibility from
management to employees, non-hierarchical forms of work organisation and sharing of
information between, and within, different levels of organisation”. Thus one more issue
– information sharing is added to empowerment. Similarly, Klidas (2001) distinguishes
between the aggregative and integrative notions of empowerment, where the first refers
to autonomy granting and the latter to the enhancement of individual or group potential