Effective Empowerment in Organizations

Psychological empowerment is the perception that workers can help determine their own work roles, accomplish meaningful work, and influence important decisions. Empowerment has been studied from different perspectives, including employee perceptions, leadership behaviors, and management programs. Despite positive rhetoric, programs designed to increase empowerment seldom achieve the benefits promised. Inconclusive and seemingly contradictory outcomes stem from the fact that few companies give employees significant control and access to management information. A half century of research suggests that empowerment strategies can offer real benefits. We outline facilitating conditions for effective empowerment, including characteristics of organizations, leaders, employees, and the work itself

Effective Empowerment in Organizations

Psychological empowerment is the perception that workers can help determine their own work roles, accomplish meaningful work, and influence important decisions. Empowerment has been studied from different perspectives, including employee perceptions, leadership behaviors, and management programs. Despite positive rhetoric, programs designed to increase empowerment seldom achieve the benefits promised. Inconclusive and seemingly contradictory outcomes stem from the fact that few companies give employees significant control and access to management information. A half century of research suggests that empowerment strategies can offer real benefits. We outline facilitating conditions for effective empowerment, including characteristics of organizations, leaders, employees, and the work itself

Perceptions of knowledge sharing among small family firm leaders: a structural equation model

Small family firms have many unique relational qualities with implications for how knowledge is passed between individuals. Extant literature posits leadership approach as important in explaining differences in knowledge-sharing climate from one firm to another. This study investigates how leadership approaches interact with family influence to inform perceptions of knowledge sharing. We utilize survey data (n = 110) from owner-managers of knowledge-intensive small family firms in Scotland. Our findings present a choice in leadership intention, contrasting organization-focused participation against family-influenced guidance. Insight is offered on the implications of this leadership choice at both organizational and familial level

The Paradox of Power in CSR: A Case Study on Implementation

Purpose Although current literature assumes positive outcomes for stakeholders resulting from an increase in power associated with CSR, this research suggests that this increase can lead to conflict within organizations, resulting in almost complete inactivity on CSR. Methods A single in-depth case study, focusing on power as an embedded concept. Results Empirical evidence is used to demonstrate how some actors use CSR to improve their own positions within an organization. Resource dependence theory is used to highlight why this may be a more significant concern for CSR. Conclusions Increasing power for CSR has the potential to offer actors associated with it increased personal power, and thus can attract opportunistic actors with little interest in realizing the benefits of CSR for the company and its stakeholders. Thus power can be an impediment to furthering CSR strategy and activities at the individual and organizational level

Supervisor-Directed Emotional Labor as Upward Influence: An Emotions-as-Social-Information Perspective

To access organizational resources, subordinates often strive to influence supervisors' impressions. Moreover, subordinates' interactions with supervisors are known to be ripe with emotions. Nevertheless, research on upward impression management has rarely examined how subordinates' emotion regulation in supervisor interactions may shape their tangible outcomes. The present study introduces subordinates' emotional labor toward supervisors as a novel means of upward influence. Building on the emotions‐as‐social‐information model, we propose that supervisor‐directed emotional labor indirectly relates with supervisory reward recommendations by shaping supervisors' liking and perceived competence of subordinates. Moreover, we cast supervisors' epistemic motivation as a boundary condition for these indirect relations. We tested these notions using time‐lagged data from 377 subordinates and 91 supervisors. When supervisors' epistemic motivation was higher (but not lower), (1) supervisor‐directed surface acting related negatively with supervisors' liking and perceived competence of subordinates and (2) supervisor‐directed deep acting related positively with supervisors' liking of subordinates. Liking and perceived competence, in turn, related positively with supervisors' willingness to recommend subordinates for organizational rewards. These findings highlight supervisor‐directed emotional labor as an upward impression management strategy with both beneficial (deep acting) and detrimental (surface acting) implications, and they illustrate important mechanisms and a key contingency factor for these consequences

Virtual Team Leader Communication:Employee Perception and Organizational Reality

Based on a study of leader communication effectiveness conducted in a large human resource outsourcing firm, this article reports how virtual team members’ perceptions of their leaders’ effective use of communication tools and techniques affect team performance outcomes. The study also investigates the role that trust plays in moderating the relationship between virtual team members’ perceptions of their leaders’ effective use of communication and team performance. Analysis of 458 responses from 68 teams found a positive relationship between virtual team members’ perceptions of leaders’ effective use of communications and team members’ perception of their team’s performance. The study also found that trust strengthens the relationship between perceived leader communication effectiveness and team performance results. Last, the study also revealed serious organizational alignment issues between what team members perceived to be effective leader communication, their perception of team performance outcomes, and the organizations performance measured by a balanced scorecard

Envisioning innovation:Does visionary leadership engender team innovative performance through goal alignment?

Visionary leaders paint an image of the future with the intention to persuade others to contribute to the realization of that specific future. In the current study, we test the hypothesis that visionary leadership stimulates team creativity and innovation because visionary leadership promotes goal alignment amongst team members which, in turn, facilitates team creativity and innovation. In an experimental study (N = 50 groups), we found that goal alignment indeed mediated the relationship between visionary leadership and team creativity, but not between visionary leadership and team innovation. In a field study (N = 308 respondents) we found visionary leadership to be related to both team creativity and innovation through goal alignment. Moreover, the field study also showed that communication quality strengthened the relationship between goal alignment and team innovation. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of visionary leadership in teams where creativity and innovation are desirable team performance outcomes

Leading through agonistic conflict: Contested sense-making in national political arenas

This article examines the social processes of political leadership in situations of contest and conflict, taking place within a key and long-established democratic institution, the UK Parliament. The empirical focus is on leadership in House of Commons select committees, which are concerned with holding the government to account. Headlines and media scrutiny, combined with internal challenge from the cross-party mix of politicians on the committees and a range of external stakeholders, create leadership challenges for committee chairs. The study is of two committee inquiries led by the same committee chair, which occurred concurrently and in real time, thereby providing a rare comparative study of leadership through the same leader at the same time but with different leadership challenges. Rather than shying away from conflict, as does much of the leadership literature, this research highlights how leaders who actively engage in challenge and conflict can build a degree of shared purpose among diverse groups of stakeholders. It examines and combines, in theory elaboration, two theories relevant to understanding these leadership processes: agonistic pluralism with its role in creating respectful conflictual consensus, and the theory of sense-making and sense-giving. The two cases (the two inquiries) had different trajectories and reveal how the chair recognised and dealt with conflict to achieve sense-making outcomes across divergent interests and across political parties. There are implications not only for understanding political leadership but also more widely for leadership where there are diverse and sometimes conflicting interests