A majority of American workers right now are not feeling very motivated on the job, according to the ADP Research Institute.
Management experts often encourage businesses to motivate employees by empowering them. The idea is that when workers are free to make decisions and manage their workday, they become more motivated, perform better and work more creatively.
However, for decades, employee empowerment initiatives have often failed or fallen short of expectations.
I have studied the effects of leader behavior on employee motivation for over a decade. I’ve learned that when companies implement empowering leadership initiatives, they often overlook key factors.
As a result, their efforts to empower employees often are ineffective. In fact, they can even lead employees to engage in unethical behavior.
Here are four ways a company can avoid common pitfalls to empowering leadership initiatives.
Provide all needed resources. Empowered employees need to know they can access whatever resources they need to succeed. A marketing professional might need access to information databases, planning software and a sufficient budget for market research. Employees should also feel that additional resources to support new ideas are available if needed.
To do this, companies can plan and budget jobs in ways that guarantee that employees have additional resources.
Set clear goals and strategies. “People can’t be self-managing without information,” business management expert Gary Hamel once noted. “[The] goal is to provide staffers with all the information they need to monitor their work and make wise decisions.”
In other words, companies can more effectively empower their employees if they divulge or communicate how their responsibilities fit into the bigger picture.
Firms can offer check-ins or town hall meetings at which everybody in the organization can ask questions about strategic goals and vision.
Signal clear and unwavering support. Employees who are truly empowered believe they have the emotional and physical support needed from colleagues – including supervisors, peers and subordinates – to do their jobs well.
Likewise, managers can emphasize that they believe in employees’ capabilities and are there to enable employee growth and autonomy.
Research across several studies shows that when employees do not have access to resources, information and support, they are not, in fact, empowered. As a result, the desired performance-boosting effects on their job performance, proactive behavior and creativity do not take place.
Remove red tape and other “bad” stressors. Unnecessary red tape, office politics, ambiguity and interpersonal conflict create a lot of negative stress for employees. These “bad” stressors are different from “good” stressors that can encourage growth.
Another study showed that an empowering leadership style paired with high amounts of “bad” stressors can actually backfire and be detrimental to a company. We found that employees in those situations are more likely to disengage morally from their work and act unethically.
Empowering leadership instills in employees a mindset to get things done and a desire to pay back the organization for the empowerment received. But without the information, resources and support to succeed – or when there is a lot of negative stress in employees’ work environments – people seem to switch to an expediency mindset whereby anything goes.
If business executives truly want to empower their employees, they cannot merely encourage managers to empower their subordinates. Otherwise, employees can feel left dangling in the void, struggling to prove their ability and even tempted to take actions that could eventually harm the company.
Tobias Dennerlein is an assistant professor of management at Purdue University. Distributed by The Associated Press.
