An exploratory study of information systems in support of employee empowerment

Abstract

The notion of employee empowerment in today' s organizations is becoming increasingly important with the growing degree of responsibility individual employees hold. This paper presents the ® ndings of a longitudinal study which examined the relationship between computer-based information systems (IS) and empowerment in detail drawing heavily on empirical work carried out in the British manufacturing industry. The paper elaborates and discusses the conceptual issues which are relevant to the idea of empowerment and its relationship with IS, before determining empowerment to be in essence the decentralization of decision-making authority to lower levels of the organization. The lack of any research on this topic led us to carry out a combination of empirical research. A large-scale postal survey of 450 UK manufacturing companies followed by a series of 20 in-depth interviews in 18 top UK manufacturing organizations formed the basis for this paper. The ® ndings con® rmed that empowerment is indeed pursued by many UK manufacturing organizations within their various efforts at improving their organization of work. The research participants viewed IS as an important enabling tool for empowerment offering many opportunities, but clearly noted that the role of IS in this is supportive rather than initiating; IS do not lead to employees becoming empowered. However, the interviews revealed that manufacturing organizations are facing a wide range of problems and dif® culties with their existing IS raising a number of constraints. The paper concludes with a number of practical suggestions for using IS as a supportive means for empowering employees.

Role of railways in empowering travelers: A case study from the Czech Republic

“…Various research results have shown that access to information itself is considered one of the aspects of the empowerment process (Conger and Kanungo, 1988). Access to information is critical for empowerment (Psoinos et al, 2000) and consumers' equate 'empowerment' with access to 'information' (Harrison et al, 2006). Thus, information is important in defining the 'empowerment' construct.…”

Empowerment in IT Education

“…The term 'empowerment' has been used by at least one other organisation (Psoinos, Kern, Smithson, 2000) but this was specifically concerned with the benefits that accrued from providing staff with appropriate computer based support tools, a subject that has been addressed by several other authors (e.g. Callahan and Khatsuriya, 1998;Joshi and Rui, 2000).…”

An holistic approach to understanding the changing nature of organisational structure

“…On the one hand, it can be hypothesized that the scale and success of an ERP implementation should be positively associated with the degree of organizational decentralization: the dissemination of information to employee workstations, across the enterprise, should facilitate employee empowerment [Psoinos et al, 2000]. An alternative, yet equally plausible, hypothesis is that ERP adoption will facilitate the centralization of decision-masking [Torkzadeh & Doll, 1999].…”