By definition, employee empowerment is the manner an organization provides its employees with a certain degree of control and autonomy over their tasks. Companies can achieve this in several ways, and employee empowerment includes helping subordinates create and manage new tactics and systems (Thompson et al., 2020). Further, Thompson et al. (2020) show that business leaders can empower their workers by allowing them to have their voice in process improvement and running different sections with less oversight from higher management levels. Regardless of their employment level, all workers need to establish mutual trust, have clear guidelines and expectations, and feel comfortable when taking risks. When companies operate under such circumstances, they realize the significance of providing their employees with the training, tools, and authority they need to excel in their job (David, 2017). One significant principle for leaders to effectively empower their subordinates is by providing them with ways to make critical decisions while assisting them to ensure they make the right decisions (David, 2017). When leaders successfully empower their employees, organizations encounter better quality and heightened productivity while establishing work-life balance.
Delegating authority is the decision-making responsibility and labor division that leaders allow individual employees to report to them. It is an organizational process where managers divide their work among their subordinates (David, 2017). The difference between authority delegation and empowering employees is that when adopted, delegation allows the leader to remain at the center of leadership (David, 2017). However, in the case of empowerment, leaders distribute their roles among their employees, making them authority over what they do (Thompson et al., 2020). Further, authority delegation enables the manager to allocate duties and activities to individual employees while specifying what they need to do and how to do their tasks.
On the contrary, empowering subordinates means managers give their workers the authority to make decisions, which makes them feel accountable for their duties. Lastly, delegating authority brings into context the notion that it fosters the production of followers while empowerment fosters the development of leaders (Thompson et al., 2020). That happens because leaders who delegate their duties maintain the power to tell their workers how to approach their activities, while those who empower themselves divide their authority or power among their employees. Moreover, empowerment is centered on value and power-sharing, unlike delegation.
Empowering employees is critical for effective strategy execution and management. When leaders give authority or power to their subordinates, they enable them the opportunity to perform better during a strategy’s development and execution phases (David, 2017). Further, Thompson et al. (2020) argue that employees are the ones who execute strategies and make them successful. When they feel empowered, workers increase their performance inspiration and implementation. Additionally, they gain self-determination and self-confidence and become willing to make every initiative to positively impact their participation in the decision-making process (David, 2017). Each of these attributes and behavior is essential when it impacts strategic implementation within an organization.
Organizational members who feel they have the right to impact their business’s decisions believe in their ability to perform certain activities. Therefore, they are likelier to engage and persist in task performance (David, 2017). When such members have high self-efficacy or competence and believe in their abilities to perform their activities successfully, they positively impact new strategy execution in their tasks. That happens since an employee’s self-efficacy degree is directly related to better work performance.
References
David F. R. (2017). Strategic management: concepts and cases: a competitive advantage approach (Sixteenth edition Global). Pearson Education Limited.
Thompson A. A., Peteraf M. A. Gamble J. & Strickland A. J. (2020). Crafting and executing strategy in the quest for competitive advantage. Concepts (22nd edition. International student). McGraw-Hill Education.