Means giving employees the authority and responsibility to respond quickly to customer requests

Quality Glossary Definition: Employee empowerment

Employee empowerment is defined as the ways in which organizations provide their employees with a certain degree of autonomy and control in their day-to-day activities. This can include having a voice in process improvement, helping to create and manage new systems and tactics, and running smaller departments with less oversight from higher-level management.

A key principle of employee empowerment is providing employees the means for making important decisions and helping ensure those decisions are correct. When deployed properly, this should result in heightened productivity and a better quality of employee work and work life.

How Does Employee Empowerment Work?

Employee empowerment varies based on an organization's culture and work design. However, empowerment is based on the concepts of job enlargement and job enrichment. Job enlargement differs from job enrichment in that job enlargement is horizontal expansion and job enrichment is considered vertical.

• Job enlargement: Changing the scope of the job to include a greater portion of the horizontal process.
  • Example: A bank teller not only handles deposits and disbursement, but also distributes traveler's checks and sells certificates of deposit.
• Job enrichment: Increasing the depth of the job to include responsibilities that have traditionally been carried out at higher levels of the organization.
  • Example: The teller also has the authority to help a client fill out a loan application, and to determine whether or not to approve the loan.

As these examples show, employee empowerment requires:

• Training in the skills necessary to carry out the additional responsibilities
• Access to information on which decisions can be made
• Initiative and confidence on the part of the employee to take on greater responsibility

Employee empowerment also means giving up some of the power traditionally held by management, which means managers also must take on new roles, knowledge, and responsibilities. However, this does not mean that management relinquishes all authority, delegates all decision-making, and allows operations to run without accountability. It requires a significant investment of time and effort, especially from management, to develop mutual trust, assess and add to individuals' capabilities, and develop clear agreements about roles, responsibilities, risk taking, and boundaries.

What Does an Empowered Organizational Structure Look Like?

Employee empowerment often also calls for restructuring the organization to reduce levels of the hierarchy or to provide a more customer- and process-focused organization.

Employee empowerment is often viewed as an inverted triangle of organizational power. In the traditional view, management is at the top while customers are on the bottom; in an empowered environment, customers are at the top while management is in a support role at the bottom.

Employee Empowerment resources

Driving Higher Workplace Performance: Using Analytics, Dashboard Metrics, and Soft Skills to Improve Results When assigned the task of improving warehouse performance for a Western Canadian industrial distribution center, a lean Six Sigma Black Belt discovered the differences between "human" and "automated" business processes.

Get Staff Involved in Quality Initiatives (Quality Progress) By challenging employees to solve quality problems, a company saved more than $3.5 million the first year.

If You Give Your Employees a Voice, Do You Listen? (Journal for Quality and Participation) Making it easy for your employees to share their feedback is the first step. Being willing to respond quickly to their input builds commitment.

Empowerment in Total Quality: Designing and Implementing Effective Employee Decision-Making Strategies (Quality Management Journal) This paper provides a conceptual definition of empowerment and offers an implementation strategy for total quality management managers.

Adapted from The Certified Manager of Quality/Organizational Excellence Handbook, ASQ Quality Press.

In an organization, efficiently dividing work among people and coordinating their duties and tasks towards a common objective should always be a central goal. Managers and employees alike will find an extra layer of job security, and overall company success, if they have a thorough understanding of two essential work concepts: authority and responsibility. Success at work requires both of them, not just one. 

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Authority and Responsibility: What Do They Mean?

What is Authority? 

In simple terms, authority refers to the commanding of subordinates, the issuing of orders and instructions, and the process of exacting obedience from a workforce. While authority is defined as having the power to give orders and be obeyed, it also encompasses the power to make decisions on the organization’s behalf. As a result, whether or not someone in a position of authority acts hinges upon their own perception of the objectives of the organization. 

Usually, any official authority embedded into a job description is ineffective. While status and ranking influence the amount of leeway your subordinates have, authority is influenced largely by the individual characteristics of the leader. For example, the presence of leadership traits such as intelligence, experience, and creativity, are likely to influence the amount of respect garnered for your authority, thus increasing your power to command others.  

A manager needs authority. It makes their position real and quantifiable, and provides them the power to order their subordinates and get them to comply in accordance with the company’s objectives. Whenever there is a chain of superior-subordinate business relations in a company, it is authority that binds them and provides a framework for responsibility.  

What is Responsibility? 

Responsibility refers to the state of being accountable or answerable for any obligation, trust, or debt. It is the obligation to complete an assigned task on time, and to the best of your ability. While authority does not automatically come with every job, task, or duty, responsibility arises in every single position in a company. It is always some combination of tasks, duties, goals, objectives, teams, deadlines, and all other terms that describes what someone does at work. Responsibility, is, essentially, the ability to respond to various work-related tasks, making it a universal facet of any job.  

Authority and Responsibility as a Character Trait 

Employees of any standing will have varying levels of innate initiative and leadership abilities. When an individual has a high amount of these qualities in their everyday work, they can easily create their own authority and ensure the completion of their tasks is done properly and in a timely manner. These are the individuals who ask before they are told, who suggest and negotiate, who persuade through diplomacy, fact, and reason. These are the individuals who think through all possible options and scenarios, getting themselves ready for a delegation of authority from their boss should that conversation come. Instead of waiting for authority to be plopped into their laps by some higher-up, they are proactive and authoritative with themselves consistently.  

Authority and Responsibility: How Are They Connected? 

The Relationship Between Authority and Responsibility 

Responsibility without authority is a common problem in organizations with uneven, inconsistent management. Individuals who end up with responsibility without authority will always find it much harder to succeed and will find themselves in trouble more frequently than those with a strong authority presence. This is largely due to the interconnectedness of authority and responsibility when it comes to making an organization successful as a whole. Proper authority exists to delegate tasks effectively in order to meet the organizational objectives. When there is no authority, the enforcement of duties and tasks falls to the wayside, and employee efforts stray from the path towards progress.  

If an individual is given some level of responsibility without sufficient authority enforcing that, they are likely not going to perform to the best of their ability, and could even fail to accomplish the task at all. However, the relationship between authority and responsibility is reciprocal. While sufficient authority should be a given, too much authority with a disproportionate amount of responsibility can also cause issues. If excess authority is delegated to an individual without a matching amount of responsibility, then the delegated authority will be misused in one way or another.  

The Key Differences 

The objective of any management team is to establish a sound organizational structure, and the only way to do so is to have an effective authority and responsibility relationship embedded into the company. As we have already discussed, whenever authority is used, responsibility ensues. But what are the distinctions between these two concepts? 

In Conclusion 

Authority and responsibility are inherent to organizational roles and positions in very different ways, but are symbiotic and codependent enough to make them both critical points of focus for any successful company. While assigning certain responsibilities to an employee, the required amount of authority should also be bestowed on them so they are able to successfully complete it. Essentially, the delegation of authority can only be effective if it matches with the assigned responsibility. 

If an authority is given to an individual that is much greater than the responsibility, it ultimately results in the misuse of authority. Similarly, if responsibility is assigned that is greater than the authority provided with it, the tasks will not be carried out properly. The primary goal of managing the relationship between authority and responsibility in your business endeavors is to find the balance between the two. As a delegator of authority, it is your responsibility to find the right ratio of authority to responsibility that will yield a successful completion of tasks consistently across your workforce.  

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