Employee Empowerment in Manufacturing

New Technology, Work and Employment 17:2ISSN 0268-1072

Employee empowerment inmanufacturing: a study of

organisations in the UK

Anna Psoinos and Steve Smithson*

Based on a postal survey and interviews, this paper analysesemployee empowerment in the UK manufacturing industry,including how it is pursued and perceived, and the key factorsthat determine success. Success seems to depend on far-reach-ing changes in procedures, hierarchies and reward structures.This need to mobilise individual agents and structure recon-firms the agency-structure duality.

IntroductionEmpowerment has come to be widely regarded as a potentially effective way tomanage organisations (Blanchard et al., 1996; Bowen and Lawler, 1992; Byham andCox, 1991; Mills, 1995). Employee empowerment and involvement—as it was knownin the 1970s and 1980s—has been a topic of recurring interest in management, parti-cularly in manufacturing (Batstone, 1984; Marchington et al., 1993; Millward et al.,1992; Wilkinson, 1998). Detailed discussions can be found in the work of manyauthors, including Eccles (1993) and Claydon and Doyle (1996).

Although empowerment is by no means new, managerial practices and discourseshave changed significantly over the last three decades. As economic contexts andmanagement concerns change, these ideas evolve with them. Global competition(Lawler et al., 1992) and the turbulent business environment (Scott Morton, 1991)have put pressure on companies to constantly improve efficiency and performance.This pressure has raised concerns regarding:

� effectiveness of the organisational structure and processes;� cost control;� flexibility and speed of response to market demands;� quality improvement.

* Correspondence concerning this paper should be sent to Steve Smithson❒ Anna Psoinos is at Datamedia SA Information Systems, Athens, Greece and Steve Smithson is atInformation Systems Department, London School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street,London WC2A 2AE, UK.

Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.

132 New Technology, Work and Employment

These concerns are all indirectly related to empowerment. Many companies haveaddressed process effectiveness through business process re-engineering (BPR),whose ‘fathers’, Hammer and Champy, argue that ‘processes can’t be re-engineeredwithout empowering process workers’ (Hammer and Champy, 1993: 71). A commonapproach to cutting overheads involves reducing layers of management (Dopson andStewart, 1993), resulting in delegating responsibility to low-level staff (Klose, 1993;Lawler et al., 1992; Mishra and Spreitzer, 1998). Similarly, the demand for flexibilityand speed of response has led to decentralisation and hence the empowerment oflower-level managers and staff (Kanter, 1984). The drive for improved quality hasled to total quality management (TQM) (Deming, 1986; Juran, 1989), involving theintroduction of quality circles, problem-solving teams, and autonomous work groups(McArdle et al., 1995).

However, Argyris (1998) claims that, despite all the attention and effort,empowerment has not delivered the promised benefits and still remains mostly an‘illusion’. This failure is attributed to the traditional management systems and theircontradictions with the philosophy of empowerment. Claydon and Doyle (1996)argue that empowerment seems to be more of a myth rather than a reality. From ananalysis of the 1995 Australian Workplace Industrial Relations Survey, Harley (1999)finds no evidence of increased employee autonomy from empowerment schemes. Heargues that any remaining hierarchy limits the extent to which management can ‘giveaway’ power.

Accordingly we decided to investigate the practice of empowerment in UK manu-facturing organisations. One arm of this study, concerning the relationship ofempowerment and information systems, is published elsewhere (Psoinos et al., 2000).This paper concentrates on the current practice of empowerment itself. Our focus isan extensive programme of field research that collected empirical data through apostal survey and a series of in-depth interviews in selected companies.

We focused on manufacturing organisations because their empowerment practicesseem to be more common, and the impact stronger, than in service firms (Bowenand Lawler, 1992; 1995). Also they have more experience in empowerment (Lawleret al., 1992). While the harsh trading conditions apply generally, arguably manufac-turing companies have undergone greater technological change and have had tofocus more on the work content of employees and their well-being. This is relatedto the increasing adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies (Siegel et al.,1997). This has resulted in a considerable literature in the area (Edwards, 1989; Shaniet al. 1992; Siegel et al., 1997). Despite certain benefits (Zuboff, 1988), the shopfloorreality is often still hard and ‘inhuman’. Therefore manufacturing firms might bemore likely to consider the quality of working life in any rationale for empowerment.

We begin with a critical review of the theory and practice of empowerment, basedon the literature. After a brief description of the research methods followed, wepresent the findings from the survey and the in-depth interviews. These are analysedto derive the reasons for the adoption of empowerment, its implications foremployees, the perceived success of these initiatives and some critical facilitators andconstraints. To conclude, the paper puts forward some implications for practice andoutlines its main contributions.

Critical review of the empowerment literature

While it is easy to offer empowerment as a panacea for organisations’ performanceproblems, the concept does have various problems, both theoretically and in practice.Much of the popular literature is limited to descriptions of success stories and recipesof ‘how to get there’. This is exacerbated by the fragmented and diverse approachto implementation followed by many organisations in practice. We believe that bothconstitute major problems in the study and development of empowerment.

Like many other ‘everyday’ terms, ‘empowerment’ is deceptively complex theoreti-cally. Researchers such as Conger and Kanungo (1988), Mondros and Wilson (1994),

Employee empowerment in manufacturing 133 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.

Mullender and Ward (1991), and Russ and Millam (1995) argue that the term is oftenused rhetorically, and has rarely been defined clearly.

While employees may ‘be’ empowered, according to some ‘objective’ criteria, forvarious reasons (cultural, inappropriate comparisons with other staff) they might not‘feel’ empowered (Conger and Kanungo, 1988). On the other hand, managementrhetoric may be so effective that employees perceive themselves to be empowered,yet this may not match external criteria. Some definitions of empowerment empha-sise the transfer of responsibility and decision making authority (e.g. Peiperl, 1996).Others take a motivational approach, placing emphasis on perceptions and beliefsof power and competence (Harley, 1999; Klose, 1993; Mondros and Wilson, 1994),and control and self-efficacy (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; Parker and Price, 1994).Wilkinson (1998) identifies five types of empowerment: information sharing, upwardproblem solving, task autonomy, attitudinal shaping, and self-management.

It is also unclear whether empowerment has to come from within the individual,or whether the organisation can indeed empower its employees. Most companiesapproach empowerment through an organisational change initiative which altersvarious procedures and responsibilities and urges employees to be more innovative,more responsible and so on. Thus, although empowerment may be proclaimed tocome from within, companies often encourage it from the outside. Bowen and Lawler(1995) emphasise the need for high-involvement practices that create in employeesan ‘empowered state of mind’, while Argyris (1998, 2000) stresses internal commit-ment and personal employee reasons and motivations. This issue is closely relatedto the dichotomy between structure and agency (Giddens, 1984).

The third conceptual issue is whether there is a difference between ‘participation’,‘involvement’ and ‘empowerment’. It has been argued that empowerment hasevolved from industrial democracy through participation and involvement (Batstone,1984; Marchington et al., 1993; Wilkinson, 1998). However, these terms are often usedinterchangeably (see e.g., Lawler et al., 1992; Marchington et al., 1993; Millward et al.,1992). This confusion could be responsible for certain ‘empowerment’ failures(Fantasia et al., 1988; Ogden, 1992; Wagner, 1994). We would argue that the majordifference between these concepts is related to the ‘transfer’ of decision-making auth-ority. Whereas in both involvement and participation, management retains control,in empowerment employees have—at least to some degree—authority to make andimplement their own decisions.

The conceptual problems are exacerbated when we consider the practice ofempowerment. While it is frequently seen as a key ingredient of success for TQM orBPR programmes (Lawler et al., 1992), such programmes aim primarily at efficiency,effectiveness and cost reduction, treating empowerment instrumentally. In suchcases, empowerment becomes an empty rhetoric or a fortunate by-product. Thereare claims that TQM’s job redesign often results in tightly controlled, simplified workand allows limited discretion to the employee (Bowen and Lawler, 1995). Crosby(1979) argues that quality management can only be effective if it starts at the top andthen senior managers and supervisors ‘orient employees’; all employees have to doto solve quality problems is ‘list the problem; the appropriate functional group willdevelop the answer’ (Crosby, 1979: 117). More recently, Powell (1995) proclaims thattacit, behavioural features such as open culture, employee empowerment and execu-tive commitment drive TQM success, whereas Randeniya et al. (1995) identifyempowerment as a leading cause of the failure of TQM.

Similar inconsistencies have been highlighted with empowerment and BPR(Willmott, 1995; Boudreau and Robey, 1996). Hammer and Champy (1993) claim thatBPR changes people’s roles, from controlled to empowered. As teams assume moreresponsibility, they must also be given the authority to make decisions. However,this does not easily fit with BPR’s emphasis on leadership, the key role of seniormanagers, and its top-down approach (Jones, 1994). In a review of BPR practices inBritain, few organisations attempted changes in organisational culture or workdesign (Childe et al., 1996).

In its original meaning, to empower means to ‘authorise, give power to’ (Tulloch,

134 New Technology, Work and Employment Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2002.

1993) and accordingly, we argue that central to the concept of empowerment, is thedelegation of power to staff to make and implement decisions. These decision-making responsibilities range from task execution to task design. Thus, employeesassume more authority to control the coordinating, allocative, improving and controlfunctions associated with their tasks. By defining empowerment as the decentralis-ation of decision-making authority we can capture the broader changes that arenecessary for empowerment to be something more than rhetoric.

Research methodsWe decided to adopt a ‘mixed method’ research design (Gallivan, 1997), undertakingboth a large-scale exploratory postal survey and a number of case-study interviews.The value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods has often been high-lighted (Attewell and Rule, 1991; Giddens, 1984; Jick, 1979; Robey, 1994, Hartwickand Barki, 1994). Kraemer (1991) argues that survey research is enhanced when usedwith other qualitative methods. Surveys are essentially snapshots at a particular pointin time, which yield little insight into the causes or processes behind the phenomena(Gable, 1994). The in-depth interviews provided us with rich insights into preciselythese dimensions.

Interpreting empowerment as the decentralisation of decision-making authority,as opposed to employees’ subjective feelings of autonomy, we decided to surveymanagers. Thus, the survey was addressed to the Personnel and Human Resourcemanagers of the top 450 manufacturing companies in the UK. The questionnaireaddressed changes in work organization, employee empowerment, and informationsystems in empowerment. The mailing list was selected from the Times 1000 andthe Financial Times UK 500 companies. An overall response rate of 29.8 per cent wasachieved, with a 23 per cent rate for usable questionnaires.

Following the survey, interviews were undertaken in 17 companies that respondedto the survey. Selection was based on the information provided in the questionnaires.We also aimed to include a wide range of products and manufacturing processes(process and discrete) in order to encompass different manifestations ofempowerment. A semi-structured interview protocol was used with many open-ended questions. The interviews were scheduled for one hour but often lasted up totwo hours. All the interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed and sent to the inter-viewees for verification. We then developed a higher level of abstraction andinterpretation by applying the precepts of intentional analysis to the transcripts(Sanders, 1982). Particular attention was paid to seeking supporting documentationsuch as internal memos, documents and presentations, press articles and publicannual reports. This allowed us to form a qualitative, interpretative approach(Walsham, 1995). Table 1 presents a summary of the companies interviewed. Respect-ing their requests for anonymity, all names have been removed.

Presentation of empirical findings

Findings of the exploratory postal survey

Changes in work organisationThe responding companies appeared to be very active in improving their organis-ation of work;1 an impressive 88.3 per cent (91 companies out of the total 103) claimedto have introduced various change initiatives. The most popular approach was TQM(adopted by 63.1 per cent of respondents), followed by delayering (55.3 per cent),

1 In generalising from the results of the survey, particular attention needs to be paid to the inherentbias: the companies that returned the questionnaires are more likely to be pursuing empowerment.Therefore the results cannot be generalised to the entire UK manufacturing population.


Table 1: Overview of companies interviewed

Company Annual turnover No. of No. of Main product lines(£ millions) UK sites employees (UK)

1. 350 2 3500 (w/w) Health science2. 370 11 2200 Building materials3. 590 4 2800 FMCG4. 800 1 2000 Electronics5. 300 3 2000 Electrical products;

engin. materials6. 6000 4 30000 Automotive7. 3000 1 � 20000 Aerospace8. 4100 2 8500 Automotive9. 180 1 724 Commercial vehicles

10. 9000 50 � 22000 FMCG, chemicals,detergents

11. 1300 20 10800 (w/w) Cables12. 470 3 � 4300 FMCG13. N/A 1 2500 Automotive14. 4000 3 � 39000 Automotive15. 80 10 1500 Engineering

components16. 3600 3 � 3900 Oil17. 5600 7 7500 Pharmaceuticals

downsizing (52.4 per cent) and BPR (41.75 per cent). The question permitted multipleresponses. These initiatives involved various changes, depicted in Figure 1. A con-siderable number of respondents (68 per cent) had delegated managerial decisionmaking responsibilities to lower level staff.

Figure 2 shows the respondents’ ranking of the reasons for the introduction of thechange initiatives. The population comprises the 91 companies that adopted changes(100 per cent = 91). There was no significant relationship between the type of changeinitiative and the reasons for its introduction. We could therefore reasonably assumethat the most important concerns (quality, productivity, flexibility, cost reduction)are common to all initiatives. In 68 of the 91 companies (74.7 per cent) that adopteda change initiative, layers of management were removed as part of the change.Regarding empowerment, in 79 companies out of the 91 (86.8 per cent), the changeinitiative resulted in some employee empowerment. Of the other twelve companies,

Figure 1. Changes in the organisation of work where: A = delegation of managerial decisionmaking responsibilities; B = organisational restructuring based on business processes; C =integration of indirect with direct work; D = set-up autonomous or semi-autonomous teams;E = task reorganisation based on whole, identifiable pieces of work; F = job enlargement; G= job rotation


Figure 2. Reasons for the introduction of a change initiative where: A = to improve quality;B = to increase productivity; C = to increase flexibility; D = to reduce costs; E = to increasestaff commitment to company goals; F = to improve employee skills; G = to improve employeejob satisfaction and motivation; H = due to the introduction of advanced manufacturingtechnologies; I = to take advantage of new information technologies; J = to increase workerautonomy

three claimed that the company is already sufficiently decentralised and three admit-ted that their attempts at empowerment had failed. The most important constraintin the introduction of empowerment, according to these twelve companies is organis-ational culture (57.1 per cent).

In the 79 companies where some empowerment took place, empowerment doesnot seem to be related to the type or stage of the change initiative. This suggeststhat empowerment does not come about with time; either the change brings aboutempowerment when it is implemented or not. On the contrary, whether the changeresults in empowerment does seem to be associated with the reasons for its introduc-tion; the change is more likely to result in empowerment if:

� the desire to improve employee job satisfaction and motivation was a reason forchange (the hypothesis that they are independent is rejected with a chi-squarevalue of 8.509 and observed significance level 0.014)

� it involves the delegation of managerial decision making responsibilities (chi-square = 9.48 and significance = 0.002), or

� it involves job enlargement (chi-square = 4.659 and significance = 0.03) or jobrotation (Pearson = 5.325 and significance = 0.021).

Employee empowermentAnalysing the responses of the 79 companies that introduced empowerment, themost frequent changes in employee responsibilities concern quality responsibilitiesand problem solving and/or improvements (see Figure 3). This shows thatempowerment in practice normally signifies the encouragement of employees to lookfor improvements and solve problems (94.9 per cent) and additional quality responsi-bilities (91.14 per cent). The most common examples of delegated decisions were theallocation of persons to jobs and shifts (32.4 per cent), quality control responsibilities

Figure 3. Changes in employee responsibilities where: A = improvements, problem solving;B = quality responsibilities; C = planning and scheduling of their work; D = equipmentmaintenance and repair; E = sharing of team leadership responsibilities; F = supplier andexternal customer management; G = product modification and development decisions; H =no change in responsibilities; I = hiring and firing personnel decisions


Figure 4. Empowerment success

(27.9 per cent), production and maintenance scheduling (25 per cent) and plant modi-fications and/or improvements (25 per cent). Furthermore, the impact ofempowerment seems to be widespread, strongly affecting people (skills, job satisfac-tion, etc.) (71.8 per cent), organisational culture (65.4 per cent), tasks and procedures(56.4 per cent), and organisational structure (43.6 per cent).

Regarding the success of empowerment, Figure 4 demonstrates the distribution ofthe subjective rankings (0–10 with 10 as ‘very successful’) that respondents gave tothe success of empowerment in their company. Classifying rankings 0–4 as ‘unsuc-cessful’ and 5–9 as ‘successful’ suggests that in 24.1 per cent of the 79 companiesempowerment is seen as unsuccessful, in 58.2 per cent it is successful. In addition,17.7 per cent felt that it was too soon to tell or that data was unavailable. Weattempted to trace factors that might be critical for success. There is no significantrelationship between age of the change initiative and empowerment success.Although not statistically significant, it seems that BPR and downsizing are moresuccessful than the overall average, whereas delayering demonstrates less success(ratio of 0.5). Empowerment success was found to be related to job enlargement (chisquare = 4.624 and significance = 0.03) and job rotation (chi square = 4.508 and sig-nificance = 0.03). Figure 5 demonstrates the factors that influence the successful out-come of empowerment, according to the respondents.

The most common constraints are: the traditional division of tasks (76.7 per cent),hierarchical management structure (75.3 per cent), demarcation of status and skills(67.1 per cent), organisational culture (50.7 per cent), middle management (50 percent) and the complexity and rigidity of the production system (46.3 per cent). How-ever, culture and middle management are also ranked as important facilitators (46.7per cent and 38.9 per cent respectively) together with employee skills (54.8 per cent)and decision making capability of staff (48 per cent). Interestingly 52.7 per cent ofrespondents regard computer-based information systems as facilitating empower-ment while only 13.5 per cent see them as constraints.

Figure 5. Factors affecting empowerment success where: A = traditional division of tasks; B= hierarchical management structure; C = status and skills demarcation; D = organisationalculture; E = middle management; F = complexity and rigidity of the production system; G= decision-making capability of staff; H = employee skills; I = trade unions; J = high invest-ment in existing production technology; K = computer-based information systems; L = shortwork cycle; M = highly automated production system


In-depth interviews

The survey revealed a broad range of approaches to empowerment but, as expected,the results failed to provide sufficiently rich ‘contextual’ data to explain the organis-ational situation. The interview data, described in this section, puts some ‘flesh’ onthe bald statistics of the survey.

Change initiatives and empowermentFor most of the companies, empowerment came about as a result of a business changeprogramme, such as BPR, TQM, downsizing or delayering.

Empowerment is proclaimed as an inherent part of continuous improvement(TQM), in contrast to the Taylorist model where somebody else decides the best wayto perform a task. Now, employees are seen as the ones that know their roles bestand are asked to suggest new ways of performing a task.

I think empowerment to [this company] is actually giving employees flexibility and the room tomanoeuvre, to actually do their job and to do their job to a high standard. It’s about providingthem with the right training, providing them with the right skills and the right tools to actuallylook at their job and see how they’re doing their job, and are they doing their job in the bestway. And giving them scope to actually make decisions and have some impact on what they’redoing (Personnel Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

However, it seems that the impact is bounded by the definition of anemployee’s job:

. . . that doesn’t mean to say that everybody can do what they like. You’ve got to have a processto say yes, this is a good idea, and you put it in, in a way that enables you to control the changes(Personnel Manager, car manufacturer).

Also, in traditional production lines workers may not have any ‘space’ to makedecisions or think about how to do things as the line keeps rolling:

So around TQM we built concepts of cell teams in assembly areas, which is actually quite difficultin car assembly because an assembly line is a long beast and in effect the assembly line drivesthe work, it is actually very difficult for a local, small group within that line to make significantdifferences to their work performance (IT Strategy Manager, car manufacturer).

Although the emphasis on quality and continuous improvement is dependent onemployees developing a sense of ownership of their job, in everyday operationsemployee decision making ability and involvement in broader issues is often limited.However, in one company:

A group of operators put together a capital approval request, and then presented that to the vice-president for Operations. So, rather than that being a management task, there are groups of oper-ators around the business who’ve acquired those skills and have stood up in front of a coupleof hundred of their colleagues, presented a business case for improvement, and secured capitalinvestment approval (HR manager, FMCG manufacturer).

In many companies empowerment has come as a result of downsizing and delayer-ing and improved efficiencies. With fewer managers and employees on site, theremaining staff have to take on more responsibilities:

Before these redundancies there were seven layers of management. [. . .] From the shopfloor,through the leading hands, the charge hands, foremen and all that sort of thing, all the way upto the manager, there were seven levels. Now there’s just two. [. . .] So there’s short reporting linesand obviously a lot of empowerment on the shop-floor (Personnel Manager, electrical products).

However, in a climate of downsizing and delayering, empowerment requiresstrong support and encouragement:

if we’re going to run businesses with shallow hierarchies, relatively few people, then those fewpeople need to be highly-skilled, well-trained, well-motivated and thoroughly involved in thebusiness. And so we’ve deliberately set out to, to deal with those things (National Manager,FMCG manufacturer).


In stark contrast, another company reports:[. . .] morale is, I wouldn’t say it’s completely demoralised but it’s pretty quiet at the moment,pretty low. There’s a lot of people working here who know they’re going to be made redundantduring the course of the next year. [. . .] I think it [empowerment] has been forced upon peopleactually (Personnel Manager, electrical products).

Teamworking and empowermentOne company developed a comprehensive approach to empowerment through self-managed work groups. The setting up of a new business in a new building presentedan opportunity for teams to determine totally their work. The 30–40 production oper-ators with one manager were given the business requirements and they decidedhow they wanted to go about it. They designed their own shopfloor areas and workorganisation, and they decide their own workloads in terms of schedules and shifts,overnight, and weekend work. This was less easy in other parts of the company,where significant changes were needed to the organisational structure. In one area,the new shopfloor teams were incompatible with the functional management hier-archy and so the management group is now becoming a team too. The move towardsself-managed teams cannot be isolated to only some elements of the organisationand has repercussions throughout the company (e.g. training content). The need toreflect empowerment also made managers rethink the certification procedure:

and we have had a process in the past where we’ve assessed that person to say they are com-petent. When you bring in empowerment you start saying ‘now what are the values ofempowerment, who owns empowerment?’ All of a sudden you’ve got something which is actu-ally internally owned by individuals. Is that in keeping with the system where in fact you’rejudging them from the outside? Well perhaps no, if we really mean empowerment we shouldn’tbe assessing from outside we should be allowing the individuals to self-assess and see what therequirements are of them [. . .] but they actually make the assessment of whether they’re thereor not, because they own it (HR Manager, electronics manufacturer).

Within BPR, empowerment is seen as pushing decision-making down the organis-ation, with employees taking ownership of their part of the process. Speed of reactionand flexibility to the market drove a large car manufacturer to redesign their orderprocess. They decided to manufacture directly to order and not to maintain stock atdealers, but this meant a lack of a stable detailed production plan, since they couldnot know what the customer is going to order.

So you have to be very responsive all the way through the process and you can’t do that centrally.You actually need to have people in the business empowered to take local decisions about localneeds to get that flexibility. So you’re moving away from heavily centralised planning to distrib-uted decision making (IT Strategy Manager, car manufacturer).

In most car assembly lines, centralised scheduling means that cars and their con-tents are determined at the start of the line and workers do not take decisions. Inorder to reduce delivery time, car companies are now launching cars down the linewithout being completely sure about their content. Thus although, for example, asunroof has to be determined at the outset, decisions regarding accessories (e.g. radio)can be made further down the line. Operators decide which radio to fit based on thecustomer order but they must also ensure that such parts are available. These issuesintroduce significant decision making to production lines.

A car manufacturing plant had been plagued by poor industrial relations through-out the 1970s and 1980s and hence had not been allowed to bid for new investment.In 1989 the site was given the opportunity to bid for a new engine shop, as long asthey came up with a new employee agreement. The new investment was critical forthe survival of the plant and an agreement was negotiated with the trade union. Thisagreement introduced team working and employee involvement ideas for the firsttime. These were the first steps in an unintentional process that has culminated inconsiderable empowerment for the workforce:

maybe we didn’t completely understand what we were doing ourselves, to be quite honest, asregards empowering people, and how it would open the door to the involvement of theemployees (Personnel Manager, car manufacturer).


The process was very difficult initially:

we were talking about, at that time, being here for 25, 26 years and having to turn over decisionmaking to existing employees, who we’d ignored. So to start with they weren’t very impressedabout teams and thought that nothing would change. But gradually it has done (Personnel Man-ager, car manufacturer).

The changes in work practices included the introduction of teamwork, with hourly-paid team leaders, the removal of levels of supervision, and the delegation of super-visory responsibilities to teams. The change process dramatically improved theplant’s performance and the plant has become a key part of the parent company.

In other companies empowerment may also have an unintentional and ‘emergent’character, depending upon specific structural and procedural factors (e.g. adecentralised organisational structure, autonomous business units, etc.).

Nobody specifically set out to introduce empowerment. Empowerment has happened usuallywhere you’ve got some better managers who have taken the opportunity whatever changes havecome in, to create that and have got payback because of the empowered staff. So the opportunitiesare probably open to far more managers than those that have actually made it happen, but therehasn’t been if you like a coordinated campaign to introduce empowerment (Personnel Manager,aerospace company).

The results in these cases are mixed and in general one should be sceptical of suchcircumstances being able to produce much in the way of empowerment. Similarly,we found evidence of both completely independent change initiatives within onesingle company, as well as a series of changes resulting from a coordinated businessreview. Also, while some companies use a top-down approach, ensuring senior man-agement commitment, others dismiss formal change programmes as ineffective.

It is always most successful if it comes from the divisional managers [bottom-up] (IT Manager,engineering company),

Whereas in another company:

there was certainly no formal programme that launched anything. My experience is those thingsare not sustainable, are seen as gimmicks, so there was effectively a very slow kick off to thisprocess (HR Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

Changes in work practices of lower level employeesAlthough the various initiatives tend to give a slightly different ‘twist’ toempowerment, in essence they involve similar basic principles. Employees usuallyhave broader tasks and responsibilities, they have more control over their work andthey are called to continually try to improve their part of the process:

But really the most constructive step was to get beyond the management levels in the organisationto the people who actually do the work, giving them much greater autonomy than they ever hadin the past for influencing their own work environment [and] managing their own work processes(HR Manager, health science company).

Employees’ jobs have become significantly broader, moving from single, narrowtasks to multiple tasks and responsibilities, linked to broader business goals. In manyrespects, employees are much more responsible for managing themselves:

We don’t really have foremen any longer in the old-fashioned sense. So there aren’t hordes ofpeople waiting to be told what to do (National Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

In many companies, shopfloor employees are responsible for their own production,for obtaining parts and reducing stock levels. Many companies communicate thebusiness vision to employees and encourage them to drive quality, efficiency andcost improvements. Employees are often now better informed about the business asa whole, so that they can see where they can contribute. Team leaders have assumedtasks that were traditionally the responsibility of supervisors, like balancing work-load, replacing absentees and ensuring team members understand the day’s task.


Supervisors can concentrate on planning, while quality responsibilities are delegatedto team members, including self-inspection and problem solving.

There were some interesting changes, where particular tasks had been shifted fromsalaried engineers to hourly-paid operators. In developing a new model, the mainte-nance personnel in a car manufacturer get closely involved at the planning stage ofthe new shopfloor equipment, well before its introduction. In this way, these ‘coordi-nators’ can help the equipment manufacturers to design equipment that is easier touse or maintain.

We’ve got to the stage that, because they’re so competent, you know, they are making decisionswhich in the past would have been made by quite senior engineers. . . . in the past there wouldhave never been a time when an hourly-paid guy would represent [our company] with a supplier.. . . And now we just feel comfortable with that particular hourly-paid girl, being our representa-tive with the manufacturer, if it’s to talk about a decision of new equipment (Personnel Manager,car manufacturer).

While these additional responsibilities seem to make jobs more interesting, theyclearly put more pressure on employees.

Effects of empowerment on the organisationAs expected, the promotion of empowerment affected other elements of the organis-ation apart from just employees’ tasks and responsibilities. Wherever organisationalproperties remain in their previous form, they are likely to constrain empowerment.

But it’s the boundary setting bit, they [teams] don’t have total freedom. So if the managers orthe people that are looking after the rest of the system aren’t reviewing what that is like andwhat empowerment values mean for that, then you can actually end up with it in conflict (HRManager, electronics manufacturer).

In such cases, empowerment is unlikely to become ingrained. The most successfuladoptions of empowerment have entailed significant changes in all parts of theorganisation:

and when I say, change the whole way we worked, that meant changing pay systems, meantchanging organisations, meant changing attitudes, and meant changing management style, itmeant changing communication processes. It meant changing health and safety systems. It meantchanging everything in the company. So it’s a very, very dramatic change (Personnel Director,commercial vehicle manufacturer).

If our base view is that people should have big jobs with lots of scope, lots of opportunity tomanage their own situation, then clearly the structure in which we allocate accountabilities andresponsibilities, the management structure needs to change to reflect that philosophy. So we havecertainly altered our management structure (HR Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

Empowerment also affects recruitment policies as companies may want to hire adifferent type of employee. Furthermore, it affects established procedures and hier-archies. In many cases, employees have been given authority to approve expensesup to a certain level and the budgeting procedure has to be amended accordingly.One company that introduced cell teams on the shopfloor had to thoroughly redesigntheir grading structures, while another had difficulties with demarcation issues. Inone plant of a food manufacturer all shopfloor employees are now salaried, no pay-ments are made for overtime and the reward procedures were adjusted to supportempowerment.

The success of empowerment?One key issue is to gauge how successful empowerment schemes have been to dateand to identify factors that influence that success. We provided above the respon-dents’ overall perception of success, which was relatively positive. However, a deeperexamination involves consideration of empowerment’s acceptance by the workforce,measurement issues and success factors.


We found little evidence of staff resistance, assuming that the empowermentinitiative is promoted seriously and consistently:

I think employees, once they realise that this isn’t actually a five-minute wonder, that actuallywe’re talking about [. . .] the way we want our employees to operate, then people don’t turndown the opportunity to actually put up suggestions about their job, or look at their job andhow they want to change things (Personnel Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

but it took quite a long time for them [employees] to recognise that we meant it, and that some-thing was going to change. [. . .] And we’ve got to be consistent from a management point ofview and not consider it just to be the flavour of the month, which, we’ve had that before. . . .So what we’re trying to do is build a sort of process that will withstand changes at the top.And if there are future changes, we won’t be changing course significantly (Personnel Manager,car manufacturer).

Regarding the measurement of success, most respondents quoted business per-formance measures, such as profits, sales, volumes, customer satisfaction, responsetimes to customers and delivery levels. More detailed indicators such as the numberof hours necessary to assemble a product, the quality of the product, accuracy ratesin terms of invoices sent out and so on, were also used. Although these do notprecisely measure empowerment success, they do suggest improved employee per-formance:

If you focus on quality [. . .] bearing in mind that a car has probably got 4,000 part numbers andthe opportunity that there is of producing a bad-quality vehicle, you can’t just get good qualitybuilt into a vehicle, just by telling people that you want good quality. You’ve got to get theirunderstanding and support (Personnel Manager, car manufacturer).

A number of more specific, employee-related measures such as absence and turn-over rates are used to capture how people are reacting to empowerment. InvestorIn People (IIP) awards are frequently quoted as an indirect indicator of the company’scommitment to the development in employee skills.

So it’s not an accident that we now have in the UK 32 Investors in People Awards. It’s no accidentthat most of our businesses now have had ISO 9000 quality awards for several years. The impor-tance of those things to this topic [. . .], is that they all feed off each other. You can’t become anInvestor in People plant without involving everybody, making sure that the basic systems areworking (National Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

Other organisational changes imply that empowerment is progressing. Spans ofcontrol have increased dramatically and changes are also visible in grading and jobevaluation exercises:

I am responsible for grading and they’ll come to me and they’ll say this job has changed, thisperson’s now doing this, they’re now doing this, they’re now doing this, and I’m thinking, myGod I know where the job was six months ago, and this is now what they’re doing (PersonnelManager, FMCG manufacturer).

‘Softer’ changes in employee attitudes are also used as an indicator:

one of the big changes that I’ve seen over the years, people used to say, well if you want me todo that, you’d better come along with your wallet, and we’ll talk about it. They don’t talk thatway now. People are hungry to take on additional responsibility, hungry to do it (PersonnelManager, car manufacturer).

However, the need for ‘objective’ measures may be questionable after all:

we don’t have the measures to actually measure the extent of empowerment. [. . .] So I could putsome surrogates in there to say because of these things we have some sort of measure, but reallywhat we are after is behaviour and action, aren’t we? (HR Manager, electronics manufacturer).

Based on their experience, the interviewees noted various factors as facilitating orconstraining empowerment. The most important constraints seem to revolve aroundthe attitudes of managers and the established hierarchies and procedures. Many com-panies noted that managers posed significant difficulties, either due to a failure ofthe company to guide them through to the new situation or due to their own personalreluctance to relinquish control:


I think that one of the biggest problems of empowerment is senior management letting go [. . .]And if there was a criticism of management here, is that we have not sort of devolved enough,quickly enough (IT Strategy Manager, car manufacturer).

The difficulties with managers do not simply apply to the senior levels though;middle managers and supervisors are threatened by the institutionalisation of theteam leader who appears to assume many of their traditional responsibilities:

one of the problems of course of focusing on the team leader is the change in the role of thesupervisor. So some of the older supervisors, [. . .] feel under threat because part of their job thatthey used to do, is now taken over by the team leader. So we’re trying to sort of balance the two(Personnel Manager, car manufacturer).

The second major constraint that companies seem to face is the traditional structureof the organisation in terms of procedures and hierarchies:

we haven’t really let go enough of some of these management controls, for empowerment to beas successful as it could be. [. . .] you can’t really be as successful in terms of empowerment asyou might wish if you’ve got a plethora of senior management controls layered on top of whateversort of programmes you are trying to run, because people will still regard those as either a sanc-tioning process or a control process, something that limits their empowerment (HR Manager,health science company).

Other production-related aspects can constrain empowerment:

If you’re talking about very tight time deadlines, you have short production cycles, short workcycles, then there’s probably very little room to actually manoeuvre in terms of looking at howyou do things differently (Personnel Manager, FMCG manufacturer).

You wouldn’t want the person who comes in and makes it [the car] on first shift, to be doing itdifferently from the person who comes in and makes your friend’s car on second shift, whateverthat bit they do, you’d want it to be done the same (Personnel Manager, car manufacturer).

To conclude, interviewees were asked to pinpoint critical factors for the success ofempowerment. Firstly, a clear link needs to be established between employees andthe final customer:

one of the differences was they [employees] have got control of the whole process; instead ofbeing the bit at the end of the process which is being deluged with product coming in and gettingproduct out, they actually were responsible for trying to keep the customers, satisfy the customers(Personnel Manager, aerospace company).

Secondly, senior management commitment is crucial.

You then need extremely good management so you need usually strong and effective leadership,a leader, somebody who’s got the vision. Because there are all sorts of difficulties, it’s easy totalk about empowerment, in getting it done there are lots and lots of (difficulties) (Training Man-ager, building products manufacturer).

Discussion and conclusionThese findings suggest that UK manufacturing companies are involved in variouschanges to improve their work organisation, primarily TQM, delayering, downsizingand BPR. These often result, intentionally or unintentionally, in employeeempowerment, where this is interpreted as the decentralisation of decision-makingauthority to shopfloor level. In such cases, the primary changes in employee responsi-bilities relate to looking for improvements and solving problems, additional qualityresponsibilities and workload planning and scheduling.

The reasons given for these changes are mostly business related, seeking improve-ments in quality, productivity, and flexibility, as well as a reduction in costs. Rela-tively few companies seek empowerment for the benefit of the staff in terms of givingthem increased autonomy, job satisfaction or skills. While companies generally donot explicitly seek to improve the skills of their workforce, they do recognise theimportance of employee skills as a key success factor in empowerment initiatives.


Empowerment, then, is often emergent or unintentional (see e.g. Foster-Fishman andKeys (1997) versus the results of Kanter (1984) and Fenton-O’Creevy (1998). In fact,empowerment is generally perceived instrumentally rather than as an objective initself.

Similarly, our respondents do not see empowerment resulting from the need toadapt to advanced manufacturing technologies or techniques. The overall focus isone of cost-efficiency although there is evidence that empowerment has had a widerimpact, affecting the people concerned, the organisational culture, the tasks and pro-cedures, and the organisational structure.

Managers perceive the adoption of empowerment as rather successful, althoughclearly the measurement of such success is difficult (Klose, 1993). In particular, it isdifficult to disentangle changes due to the broader change initiative from thosebrought about by empowerment. We are sceptical about assessing empowermentbased on external criteria. For example, criteria which are relevant to various indus-tries in the USA (Lawler et al., 1995) may not be totally relevant to British manufactur-ing (Kochan and Weinstein, 1994), which has a very different history and culture(Batstone, 1984; Millward et al., 1992). We recommend an evaluation based oninternal and more specific criteria.

Regarding success factors, it seems that the more successful promotions ofempowerment are firstly, underpinned by a solid business rationale and secondly,have affected many organisational elements and effectively mobilised both individualagents and structure. Specific success factors are employee skills, organisational cul-ture, decision-making capability of staff and availability of information for decisions.In addition, the initiative needs to be serious and supported consistently over time,with widespread senior management support and not just presented as this week’sfad or panacea.

Constraining factors include the traditional division of tasks and the hierarchicalmanagement structure and associated culture. Empowerment often affects organis-ational culture because it demands a move from a traditional culture, where staff aregiven their job description and responsibilities, to one where they know most abouttheir job. They are now encouraged to think about what they are doing and howthey could improve things. These moves affect both the belief systems regardingthe organisation’s core values and its patterns of desirable behaviour (Smithson andPsoinos, 1997).

This change in culture illustrates the need to address the concerns not only of theworkforce but also of management at all levels, from supervisor through middlemanagement to senior management (Argyris, 2000; Eccles, 1993; Fenton-O’Creevy,1998; Foster-Fishman and Keys, 1997). Giving or sharing ‘power’ with the workforceis unlikely to come naturally to many (especially older) managers. The managers wespoke to seem very aware of the difficulties of empowerment, as well as of the cyni-cism of employees regarding initiatives such as BPR or TQM.

On the part of employees, they have to be interested in the success of the enterpriseand personal recognition is extremely important. The employees of many largeorganisations nowadays appear overworked and stressed by the constant threats ofdownsizing and cost reduction (our case studies included Rover and Ford shortlybefore plant closures). Therefore before putting more pressure on the workforce, anyshift towards empowerment must provide the staff with real benefits. This is mucheasier with smaller companies, as employees can discern more easily their part inthe business but more difficult in a climate of downsizing and delayering where‘survivors’ have to respond to change (Mishra and Spreitzer, 1998). Similarly, theworkforce also have to believe that their personal contribution is important; afterdecades of being told what they are not allowed to do, it is unnatural to expect themsuddenly to reverse this state (Shapiro, 2000).

Hence empowerment has a lot to do with the agency and structure duality whereif the one is affected then the other has to be too (Giddens, 1984). Empowermentneeds to address both dimensions. Even if employees are motivated and highlyskilled, if they work in a highly structured, constraining environment where they do


not feel that they have the power to take decisions, they will conform to that andempowerment is unlikely to succeed. On the other hand, if structural elementschange and employees are not triggered through, for example, recognition orrewards, they may not respond.

The main contribution of this study is the collection of original empirical data onempowerment in British manufacturing. This work provides an interesting contri-bution by combining an extensive survey with a series of interviews. Naturally likeany study, it has limitations. The interviews did not provide the depth associatedwith case studies since they only depicted the views of one or two individuals ineach firm. Similarly, we did not interview lower-level employees. This would haveinvolved a much larger study beyond the scope and resources available. Sometimesit is preferable not to extend the boundaries, rather than to attempt a complex topicsuperficially. Furthermore there is a bias towards larger organisations and towardsorganisations that are active with empowerment.

However, the research provided rich original insights into the way empowermentis pursued and perceived, and the effects it has on employee work practices andother organisational elements.

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Employee Empowerment in Manufacturing