Topic Question: What is the difference between delegation and empowerment? What should you emphasize during a change initiative and why?
Before we can discuss the difference between delegation and empowerment, we need to understand and define what these terms mean. While delegation of tasks is relatively straightforward as a transactional leadership function that tells people what and how to do it. Delegation is a power-coercive strategy that creates resistance and damages the underlying relationships of everyone involved in with a change initiative (Hornstein, 2006).
Empowerment is much more difficult to define. The difficulties in the consistency of defining what “empowerment” really means confuses the message of what the term means to employees, and is often used in a context that is counterproductive to the message that “empowering people” provides. Thus, we must discuss the various ways that empowerment is defined.
Empowerment can be perceived as the relationship between and individual and power (Hornstein, 2004), the ability to allow individuals the authority to make their own decisions or veto it (Lines, 2004), or in a more realistic and effective presentation of the term, it allows individuals to make decisions on how to achieve the leader’s vision as long as they are within certain parameters. If we look at empowerment as the ability of giving employees pure power, then it’s not really effective. Likewise, Lines (Lines, 2004) indicated that there was a negative correlation between giving individuals the right to veto and the implementation of successful empowerment for goal achievement. This leaves us with the last definition, which seems to be the most realistic definition of empowerment.
Hornstein (2006) states that there are three important areas that are essential to the definition of empowerment, which are high involvement, sharing power, and sharing the right level of decision-making ability. I believe that without setting the parameters for individuals (determining the right level of decision-making), the empowerment that individuals seek will not be effective. This is because if individual act outside of their authority, the leaders have to warn/discuss the employee’s behavior which negatively affects their psyche to want to change. Thus, the parameters are an important part of the definition of empowerment.
Now that we have defined delegation and empowerment, we can discuss the effectiveness of each within today’s business environment. Delegation in today’s environment cannot be as effective as empowerment strategies. Part of the reason for delegation being ineffective is that we are working in a much flatter environment today, and the rapidly shifting environment hiders quick decision making when hierarchical control is in place. The flatter environment in which we work demands more empowerment and sharing of responsibilities because in modern organizations the hierarchical support is not in place to support delegation as a tactic, and rightfully so it should have limited use. The rapidly changing global environment necessitates individuals to be able to make quick decisions, whereas past business environments allowed more time for hierarchies to be involved to make decisions.
Empowerment is essential for leaders to have successful change initiatives in today’s business environment. Waite states that, “Empowerment, participation and involvement are the cornerstones of a high performance work environment.” (Waite, 2007, p.50). The fostering of active participation of employees allows their individual needs to be met while aligning their actions with the vision of the organization. Consequently the underlying feelings of individuals need to be a part of change in order for change to be successful. Empowerment gives individuals that tools to make the change initiatives successful and allows organizations to move at a faster pace, thus keeping up with today’s changing environment.
Wren and Dulewicz’s (2005) study on the RAF showed that the top three areas of significance needed to facilitate change included managing resources, engaging communication, and empowering individuals. Individuals need to have the resources available to them to successfully implement change initiatives; they need to have honest communication with employees to generate the trust needed to make employees feel safe and embrace change; and finally they need to be empowered as this is necessary to allow individuals to change.
I believe that as a leader, we need to link the resources, communication, and empowerment through an environment that has a clear vision and strategy to ultimately implement effective change within an organization. We must not lose sight that it is ultimately the individuals that we lead which determine the success of the changes that we seek, not just a strong leader. Without the individuals to help implement changes and the empowerment necessary to facilitate the changes, the underlying behaviors will not change, which is essential to long-term success in achieving organizational goals.
In closing, let’s consider the following message about empowerment:
“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” ~General Patton
References:
Hornstein, H. A. (2004). Empowerment and process consultation: Two sides of the same coin. The Innovation Journal, 9(1),
Hornstein, H. A. (2006). Empowerment as a way to facilitate change: Can process consultation help? OD Practitioner, 38(1), 4 – 9.
Waite, M. (2007). The Impact of Workplace Constraints on Organizational Change. The Business Review, Cambridge, 7(2), 49-55.
Wren, J. & Dulewicz, V. (2005). Leader competencies, activities and successful change in the Royal Air Force. Journal of Change Management, 5(3), 295 – 309.
