Empowerment Practices and Organizational Performance: A Review of Literature

This study is a descriptive work aimed at theoretically reviewing existing literature on the impact of empowerment practices on the general organizational performance – having empowerment practice as the predictor variable and organizational performance as the criterion variable. In virtually every organization, the central objective of human resource management is to meritoriously pilot the affairs of the employees by inspiring positive work attitudes such as: enhancing productivity, satisfaction on the job, high morale, enthusiasm and organizational citizenship behavior with absolute reduction of destructive work attitudes like high quest to leave the organization, absenteeism, work evasiveness and deviant work place comportment. Existing studies have revealed that employee performance has a direct relation to an organization’s overall performance and success and that mainly empowered employees are able to perform immensely and cause the overall performance of the organization to be skyrocketed or to be at its peak. In this study, empowerment practices such as autonomy to employees, effective reward system, effective communication/information system employee participation/involvement were found to boost employee performance and by extension organizational performance. It was concluded that empowerment practices predicts organizational performance so long as the cost of adopting this practices does not exceed the profit it generates to the organization. This work will be very relevant to academia, organizations and business world at large as a source of knowledge on the importance of empowerment practice especially in terms of performance with its cost effectiveness in view.