Importance of psychological empowerment

Introduction

Such a psychological empowerment among employees has increasingly been recognized as a decisive factor for the organizational success in today's responsive enough conventional standards. Empowerment of psychology talks about the perception of an individual in his work position in terms of autonomy, capability and personal impact. Through this blog, we will focus on the important role psychological empowerment plays at work and examine the various consequences of this empowerment for the employees, including boosting motivation, engagement, and performance.

 

Autonomy: Creation of Employees Who Are Willing to Own Responsibilities

Autonomy is the core of psychological empowerment when it provides space for employees to decide about doing their jobs, select the ways, and keep responsible for their work. The studies reveal that employees have better job satisfaction when autonomy is visualized to them. They also work more effectively and their performance is improved with this recognition (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Reinforcing a sense of duty and obligation comes with the opportunity to make decisions about the workplace, and the mode of the performance, in which individuals will do the work. With the independence generated, creativity, innovativeness and taking bold risks as the ultimate solutions follow suit, pushing organizational success (Deci, 1985).

Competence: Training people to be more self-assured and having the ability to take on different tasks

Competence deals with employees' opinion on their current as well as future skills to perform well at their place of work. People positively enhance their self-efficacy when they confidently feel capable and competent in their work. They are more likely to undertake brave challenges, outline ambitious goals, and pursue opportunities for continuous learning and development. The organizations will be able to increase workforce productivity by offering training, resources, and support to the employees so that they may do better, in what they do and where they stand. As a result, we would gain the ability to cope better with stress from the pressure of the competition, while job satisfaction and job performance would also be enhanced (Bandura, 1997).

Impact: Putting the Employees in the Driving Seat to Shape things more

The notion of Impact is employees' experience of their inputs being significant components of the organizational cause leading to joint goals. When people see that their work is actually part of a greater goal for a company, they feel they have a twofold purpose for seeing that larger vision met and for themselves. Organizations can build an impact culture by appreciating and recognizing employees' work, offering them a space to partake in the decision-making processes and setting individual missions to the organizational goals. It yields a thrill effect on the employees that pushes them to perform more than required achieving innovation, collaborations and improvement in organization performance (Spreitzer, 1995).

Conclusion

Psychological empowerment is a theory that resides in organizational psychology. In the theory, people, who work for an organization, should be aware of the feeling of control, competence and impact. It guides that when employees who have a self-empowerment perception, probably they have the positive attitudes and behaviors which positively impact their performance and the organization process, accordingly. Psychological power has two basic approaches: the first one is that employees who perceive themselves as empowered regard not only that their work is meaningful and valuable, but they also acknowledge they are contributing to the organization. Such Autonomy gives employees the invaluable opportunity to become accountable for everything they do and start making better decisions that make them want to keep getting better and better. The empowerment also means to be able to trust your abilities to succeed in performing job-related duties. People are more capable of tackling the issues that may arise in their job if they are confident that they have the competencies and appropriate skills that will enable them succeed in their assignments. Also, this stimulates the perpetual learning culture and development of the organization’s culture.

Reference

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination as factors promoting human behavior. Springer Science & Business Media.

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The struggle for control. W. H. Freeman/Times Books/Henry Holt & Co.

Spreitzer, G. M. (1995). Psychological empowerment in the workplace: The dimensions, the measurement, and the validation. Academy of Management Journal 38, p. 5, 1442-1465.