Empowerment Process: Exploring The Links Between Career Development, Empowerment Practices, Employee Cognitions, and Behavioural Outcomes

Abstract

Employee empowerment approach has a positive and sizeable effect on innovativeness, as was hypothesized. This effect is larger than an employee empowerment‘s direct effect on performance. Innovativeness in turn has a small negative effect on performance. This is not surprising, given that performance as perceived by employees is measured at the same point in time as innovativeness. As literature on change and innovation indicates, innovativeness can have a negative near term effects on performance, given the start-up costs involved in adopting and implementing innovations and the disruptions such changes can cause (see Fernandez and Rainey, 20061). Over the course of time, however, innovativeness’ small near term effect might turn into a positive one, as innovation enables an organization to better adapt to the demands and challenges imposed by the external environment. The current study is unable to test for this long term effect, given the limitations posed by cross sectional data. Additional research is needed to explore this relationship longitudinally. In short, this finding suggests that the use of empowerment practices to stimulate innovation will not result in immediate gains in performance, and that managers adopting such an approach must be patient for the creativity sparked by empowerment to bear fruit in the form of performance improvements. © 2016, Global Research Online. All Rights Reserved.