Employee empowerment has been advocated by management and accounting researchers as a way to increase employee motivation. For example, the balanced scorecard concept, advocated by many management accountants, stresses the importance of empowering employees to increase their motivation, learning, and growth (Kaplan and Norton 1992, 1996).1Similarly, management studies have shown employees who feel empowered have higher levels of task motivation, which in turn, has been linked to greater organizational effectiveness and performance (Thomas and Velthouse 1990; Koberg et al. 1999).