It is crucial that managers understand that leadership empowerment has its limits and that factors such as trust and experience influence the way their behavior is perceived. One of your most important responsibilities as a leader is to get your team members to do their best work. To ensure that your employees feel empowered in their role, you need to provide honest feedback on their performance. Invite employees to be innovative in their ideas, solutions and decisions, while being empowered to implement them. Empowerment enables subordinates to work independently while mastering their own jobs by using their own knowledge, skills, abilities, and decision-making skills to achieve personal and organizational success. Creating a world-class workplace culture is all about cohesion, alignment and sustainable standards.
It is when employees are given a certain degree of autonomy and responsibility in making decisions in their daily work. When you empower employees to stand up, make their own decisions, and pave their own path to success, you create a better workplace culture. Attracting people who are aligned with the company’s purpose is the best way to help employees feel empowered to contribute to that goal.
Many leaders often try to empower their employees by delegating authority and decision-making, sharing information, and asking for their input. But a recent meta-analysis of 105 studies on this “empowering” style of leadership found that it works best to motivate certain types of performance and employee pulse survey certain types of employees. Second, when they empower their employees, these leaders are more likely to trust their subordinates as well, compared to leaders who don’t empower their employees. Finally, we examine which employees can benefit the most from a leader who wants to empower them.
When a leader successfully empowers their employees and opens the door to opportunity, they create a more connected culture and a better experience for employees. However, most leaders aren’t sure how to empower their employees without giving them a money raise, promotion, or full autonomy. Leaders, unlike managers, strive to cultivate a workplace with a positive culture and an inclusive environment that brings out the best in engaged employees. Common unifying goals result when employees experience leadership focused on real connections, team growth, and interpersonal development. Knowing how to motivate and empower employees is vital for leaders at all levels.
But we found that when leadership empowerment is also about advising and supporting employee development, it can create a relationship of trust. Like psychological empowerment, we found that this sense of trust helped explain the effects of leadership emancipation on both creativity and citizenship. This is because trust reduces uncertainty in the environment by instilling a sense of security, allowing employees to take more risks without feeling vulnerable.
Setting these expectations from their first day of work will encourage employees to maintain such a positive work culture. Unlike responsibility, a responsibility is something that is given to someone, such as a job title, a list of tasks, or the daily start time. Of course, managers expect employees to take responsibility, but that shouldn’t be the only standard used to measure employee success. This creates an environment of going through movements that don’t inspire high levels of employee engagement.
This can include having a voice in process improvement, helping create and manage new systems and tactics, and running smaller departments with less supervision from higher-level management. Good leadership is about understanding and activating the strengths of the people you lead. Employees who feel valued and know that their managers are listening to their opinions are almost always engaged and empowered.
Feeling engaged and powerful at work comes from a sense of ownership over the tasks at hand, as well as a sense of participation in overall goals. Organizations that encourage employees to take responsibility for everything they complete and achieve can best preserve by maintaining higher levels of engagement, productivity, and satisfaction. While our meta-analysis revealed new insights into leadership emancipation, in some areas there were relatively few studies available for analysis. And few studies used objective performance data; most were based on leaders’ assessments of employee performance, which can be biased.