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First test your insight with this scenario then read on
You have a regular team-building discussion with your team. One of the requests from the team is more empowerment, which includes more freedom. What will you do before allowing them more freedom?
Option A: Explain consequences of misconduct
OR
Option B: Explain the meaning of their work
Read the summary of insights from recent research below to identify the most appropriate option. For more detailed insight and development of this essential leadership dimension visit www.learn-protalent.co.za and do the module EMPOWERING LEADERSHIP in the course LICENSE TO LEAD 2027 PART 3 – ACHIEVEMENT LEADERSHIP
But what is empowerment and how can leaders empower everyone?
Below is insight from a recent study
“The effect of empowering leadership practices on employee’s performance with the mediating role of work engagement: the case of Ethio-telecom”. Authors: Medhn Desta & Hailemichael Mulie. Published by: Cogent Business & Management, 2024
Introduction
In this challenging, fast-paced global competition, empowering leadership has emerged as the major intangible asset of a company and the basic determinant of its competitive advantage, especially in human-intensive firms. Many businesses have switched out their old hierarchical management structures with empowered (semi-autonomous or self-managing) work teams to increase their operations’ overall flexibility and efficiency. Empowering leadership is a promising approach for leaders to confidently shape employee skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. It is a technique for creating a setting where it is practical to share power among the workforces. Power-sharing techniques include emphasizing the value of a worker’s accountability, allocating decision-making autonomy, demonstrating faith in a worker’s abilities, and granting autonomy to act according to circumstances. Empowering leadership builds employee confidence in their capacity to execute collective goals, creates better engagement, establishes crucial trust in an organization, and helps to increase performance outcomes. Recent research indicates that different forms of leadership like servant leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership and charismatic leadership are related to work engagement and performance outcomes. This points to the finding that a lack of empowering leadership does not essentially always lead to a poor level of employee performance as other variables may compensate for it.
Empowering leadership
Empowerment is founded on the notion that giving employees the tools, power, chance, and drive to complete their work while also holding them responsible for their actions would result in happier and more effective workers. Empowering leadership denotes a set of manners of the leaders who allocate responsibilities, encourage initiative, offer efficacy support and share power and autonomy with followers. They articulate confidence in their teams to perform better, they promote the meaningfulness of work, enhance participation in decision making, and provide autonomy from administrative constraints. Leaders who empower their teams encourage them to take ownership of their work and make independent decisions. This management approach can increase employee motivation and engagement, which can improve work output and job satisfaction. One distinctive method to leadership is empowerment, which involves assisting followers via knowledge sharing, coaching, training, and emotional support in addition to delegating and encouraging them. Thus, employees are more likely to have a sense of meaning in their jobs and feel capable of implementing job activities on a self-managed basis. Empowering leaders share power with their followers, giving them the authority to decide. They also prompt confidence in employees’ abilities to accomplish their jobs autonomously. Leader actions that promote empowerment include letting workers participate in decision-making, stressing the value of their work, showcasing their abilities, and getting rid of bureaucratic roadblocks. Employees who perceive autonomy, significance, competence, and good influence in their work also experience psychological empowerment.
Work engagement
Work engagement is the participation and enthusiasm of workers in their work and workplace. It is the term for an employee’s cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal energy that is focused on achieving successful organizational outcomes. The key elements of engagement are attention and absorption which involves the employees’ psychological presence in their work. Engagement simultaneously promotes welfare and preserves workers’ commitment to the goals, principles, and drive of the business. Engagement has three dimensions:
1. Vigor indicates spending constant effort, power, and mental resilience of the job. It suggests mental elasticity, high levels of energy, and better levels of persistence while working even when faced with difficulties.
2. Dedication denotes being inspired, keen, and highly concerned about your job. Work can provide someone a sense of purpose, as well as feelings of enthusiasm, pride, and challenge.
3. Absorption describes a lack of awareness of time passing on the work, a high level of alertness, and a sensation of detachment from your surroundings
Employee performance
Employee performance is the outcome of executing defined responsibilities, meeting deadlines, employee self-development, and effectiveness and efficiency in doing work. Researchers point out that employee performance has three dimensions:
1. Task performance is about the basic job responsibilities of workers and is mostly called “in-role prescribed behavior”.
2. Adaptive performance, on the other hand, is the extent to which an individual employee adapts to changes in the job role or work environment.
3. Contextual performance signifies “discretionary extra-role behavior.” It is reflected in actions such as coaching colleagues, consolidating social networks within an organization, and going into and working extra jobs in support of the organization.
Empowering leadership has a direct positive effect on employee performance
Empowering leadership can enhance intrinsic motivation to motivate work engagement. Empowering leadership encompasses granting employees a fair amount of autonomy, which can make workers feel responsible for their jobs and be stimulated to achieve their goals. The delegation of responsibility and participation in decision-making can enhance employees’ capability for self-determination and workers’ feelings of mastery, which can improve the employees’ motivation for work engagement. When driven by successful leadership, effective delegation develops into collaborative empowerment. By fostering the essential organizational climate, speaking on behalf of the organization, establishing the organization’s fundamental policies, and monitoring progress, leadership drives effective delegation.
Work engagement has a direct positive effect on employee performance
Self-efficacy has an impact on all aspects of human activity. It has a significant impact on both the ability one has to handle issues competently and the decisions one is most likely to make. Work engagement acts as a partial mediator in the self-efficacy–work performance association. These findings highlight the role of work engagement as a key factor in work-related well-being that can change the effects of self-efficacy on work performance.
Work engagement positively mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and employee performance
Empowering leadership is a set of actions that superiors take to transfer authority and responsibility to groups or individuals. These actions include encouraging employees to voice their opinions, promoting decision-making participation, fostering information exchange, and facilitating team decision-making. Empowering leadership includes fostering bottom-up decision-making and delegating authority to lower levels of the organizational structure. This enhances employee involvement and performance. By using these characteristics, leaders hope to increase their team members’ levels of engagement and self-management so that they develop into self-leaders and actively participate in everyday activities. Leadership is the key catalyst in encouraging the effective task performance of employees throughout the mediation role of work engagement.
Conclusion
Leaders must make work more meaningful. By showing confidence in good performance, encouraging participation in decision-making, and granting followers freedom from bureaucratic restraints, a leader can distribute authority or give followers additional responsibility and autonomy. This enhances engagement and ultimately improves performance of team members.
Action steps
Leaders of work teams directly influence the culture and performance in the workplace. It is important that they understand their leadership role and include essential leadership dimensions in their continuous professional development (CPD).
Just like the human body needs a regular portion of essential nutrients to stay healthy, every leader needs a regular reminder and refresher exercise in essential leadership dimensions. The LICENSE TO LEAD development program is such a solution with practical applications in the real workplace which positions the learner for success and career progress, and it offers international certificates in leadership and CPD points verified by SAIOSH.
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