Meaning of Empowerment

Empowerment in New Zealand firms: insights from two cases

Empowerment in New Zealand firms Amelia C. Smith
Department of Management, University of Canterbury, Christchurch
New Zealand and

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V. Suchitra Mouly
Department of Management, University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
New Zealand
Introduction
The growing popularity of programmes aimed at empowering employees through changes in work practices has been well-documented in the management literature (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Osterman, 1994).
Workplace reform, which is increasingly popular in New Zealand organizations, is an example of such a strategy. As a research topic, empowerment appears to be a nascent area insofar as the prevailing definitions do not reflect a common or shared understanding of the process.
The business press in New Zealand offers anecdotal evidence that New
Zealand firms are slow to empower employees (Story, 1997). The present paper explores the phenomenon of empowerment in New Zealand firms through casestudies of two New Zealand manufacturing organizations that have introduced programmes of workplace reform. (Besides the study of McDonald and Sharma,
1994, that focused on the New Zealand Income Support Service, which is a public service organization, we are unaware of any published case-studies of the performance of New Zealand organizations that have undertaken an empowerment programme.)
Our study attempts to gain a clearer understanding of what empowerment means to different people both within and across New Zealand organizations.
There appears to be scant published empirical evidence on the extent to which employees actually feel empowered as a result of prescriptions, such as those of
Byham (1991); thus, through interviews, the present study seeks to uncover the perceptions of employees of the extent to which they feel empowered. Finally, on the basis of case data, it proffers a set of factors that either facilitate or inhibit empowerment in

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